"Gunung Padang: The World's Oldest Pyramid Hidden Beneath the Earth," reads a March 4, 2025 Facebook post from a Thailand-based user that has since been shared over 2,000 times.
It features an image appearing to show an amphitheatre below a hilly and forested area.
"What if the oldest pyramid in the world wasn't in Egypt but in Indonesia? Gunung Padang, a mysterious site in West Java, may be just that," part of the caption adds.
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Screenshot of the false Facebook post taken on March 26, 2025
Similar posts written Chinese, Thai and Indonesian repeat the claim and include images purportedly showing the same site from slightly different angles.
Stone terraces
Multiple scholars told AFP it is inaccurate to characterise Gunung Padang as a pyramid.
Lutfi Yondri, an archaeologist from the University of Padjadjaran who has done several excavations at Gunung Padang since 1997, told AFP on March 20 that the only structure that remains at the site is a "complex of stone terraces" (archived link).
Carbon dating shows the terraces were built around 117 to 45 BC, and are on top of rock columns formed through a natural geological process, he said.
Truman Simanjuntak from the Center for Prehistory and Austronesian Studies separately said Gunung Padang "has absolutely nothing to do" with pyramids (archived link).
"Claiming there are man-made chambers inside the hills is a hallucination," he said on March 20. "Let's think rationally, and talk data."
A 2023 study in the Archaeological Prospection journal that described Gunung Padang as a "prehistoric pyramid" has been retracted after experts in geophysics, archaeology and radiocarbon dating raised accuracy concerns (archived link).
'Physically implausible'
Moreover, the images circulating online do not resemble the actual site as seen in an AFP photo taken July 2011.
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Siwei Lyu, director of the University at Buffalo's Media Forensics Lab in the United States, said an analysis of the images showed a "close to 100 percent possibility" that they were AI-generated (archived link).
He noted that one of the images violates perspective geometry, where four lines that should be parallel in the real world do not intersect. "This is a telltale sign of its AI-generative nature," Lyu said.
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Image in the false post, with visual inconsistencies highlighted by Siwei Lyu
Shu Hu, director of Purdue University's Machine Learning and Media Forensics (M2) Lab, also said the shadows in the images are "physically implausible in a real scenario" as the lights point at different directions (archived link).
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Images in the false posts, with visual discrepancies in the shadows highlighted by Shu Hu
There is no foolproof method to spot AI-generated media but identifying visual inconsistencies can help, as errors still occur despite the meteoric progress in generative AI.