The image on the right was created by Zila Abka in February. She said she created it using Microsoft’s Image Creator. On the left is what Amirul Shah calls a viral image, which he also created using artificial intelligence image generation tools.
Image generated by Amirul Shah/AI and Zila Abka/Microsoft Image Creator
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Image generated by Amirul Shah/AI and Zila Abka/Microsoft Image Creator
Two Malaysians 900 miles apart are both credited for a composite image of Gaza that became the most popular AI-generated photo ever, highlighting an online landscape increasingly overrun with AI-created content. Author The complexities of identity and ownership.
The story behind the “All eyes are on Rafa” image has been shared approximately 50 million times on Instagram and other platforms, and it likely begins on the northern tip of the Southeast Asian island of Borneo.
Back in February, Zila Abka was playing around with Microsoft’s artificial intelligence tool Image Creator at home.
Abka is a 39-year-old science teacher and an artificial intelligence art enthusiast. She is also a pro-Palestinian activist. She wanted to create a political art piece depicting those taking refuge in the Rafah refugee camp in the Gaza city.
Zila Abka is a school teacher in Malaysia. She is active in the Facebook group Promptersmalea, a gathering place for mostly Malaysian AI artists to showcase their work.
Zira Abuka
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Zira Abuka
After the phrase “All eyes are on Rafah” began to go viral, Abuka said she programmed a prompt for an artificial intelligence tool to create an image of a white tent amid a dense encampment of other tents. Spell out this sentence. The phrase has become a rallying cry after a World Health Organization representative used it to draw attention to the situation in the region from which hundreds of thousands of displaced people have fled.
When Microsoft’s Image Creator spits out a graphic, Abka slaps two watermarks on it: one to say it was generated by AI; Another theory is that she is the creator.
She loves it. So she shared a post to the Facebook group on February 14 in her language (Malay) Malaya Tippers is a gathering place of some 250,000 Malaysians who share the art of artificial intelligence generation, sometimes in connection with the Gaza War.
“I want to spread the word and highlight this issue and hope that everyone can do what they can right now to show solidarity with Gazans,” Abukar told NPR.
akbar The making of the photo has not been publicly discussed before.
Abukar: “I think it’s mine” but the watermark disappears
Since then, she had largely forgotten about it — until last week, when she saw a very similar image on Instagram that was used in an Israeli attack on the city, killing dozens and sparking protests. The news spread quickly after being condemned around the world.
But the image was changed. Her watermark disappeared. The image is enlarged to include the snowy mountains looming above the tent in an almost surrealist style, an artificial intelligence riff on the Middle Eastern landscape of Gaza.
Zila Abka generated this image in February.
Zila Abka/Microsoft Image Creator
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Zila Abka/Microsoft Image Creator
At first, she was angry that someone was whitewashing her image and removing her name. Furthermore, she was initially shocked that the “AI-generated” disclaimer disappeared just as tens of millions of people reshared it online.
She zoomed in to see every letter and corner of the viral image. She concluded that it must be hers.
“Everything about the word structure and the arrangement of the ‘tent’ is the same except for the extension,” she said. “When I saw it, I thought, yeah, I guess this is mine.”
But her annoyance at not receiving the honor quickly faded.
“I don’t think any generated AI image belongs entirely to one person,” Abka said.
In fact, the U.S. Copyright Office has repeatedly denied copyright protection for AI-generated images because they lack human authors, placing AI images in a legal gray area.
However, it is Abka’s unique cues that evoke this image. She said it should be worth it, although inspiring support for Gaza has always been her main motivation.
“If the purpose was to spread awareness,” Abkar said of the viral version of the image, “then I guess I should thank that person.”
The person behind the “Shahv4012” account
Amirul Shah is a university student and photographer in Malaysia. His “All eyes are on Rafa” image has been shared nearly 50 million times on Instagram.
Amirul Shah
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Amirul Shah
That man is Amirul Shah, known as Shahv4012 on Instagram. He is also Malaysian.
The two did not know each other and had never communicated with each other.
Abukar believed he took her photo, edited it and created an Instagram “template” that has since skyrocketed on social media, amassing nearly 50 million shares on Instagram and on other social media platforms Accumulated millions of shares.
Abkar believes Shah cropped her image above the watermark and then edited it using artificial intelligence tools to expand and reimagine the photo’s background. She believes this because she tried it herself on her own AI rendering and got results that were strikingly similar to the viral image.
Shah’s photos have his own watermark on them, tagged with his Instagram account dedicated to his photography, @chaa.my_, giving the impression that the whole thing is his original creation.
Amirul Shah added the images he generated to Instagram templates amplified by celebrities like Dua Lipa and Bella Hadid.
Image generated by Amirul Shah/AI
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Image generated by Amirul Shah/AI
When Shah was interviewed, he denied plagiarizing Abukar’s work. Instead, he shared a different version of events.
Shah, a 21-year-old university student from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia’s capital, has never made his process public before.
Photography enthusiast Shah, Said that he is currently working on artificial intelligence image generator. He thought he used Microsoft’s Image Creator is the same service Abka uses, but he claims he doesn’t remember it.
When he added it to his Instagram “template,” it sparked a huge response around the world, with influencers and celebrities like Dua Lipa and Bella Hadid using it expanded to millions of fans.
The image bears a striking resemblance to Abukar’s image, but he claimed he had not even seen Abukar’s image before making his own.
Still, the size of the words, the position of each letter, and the AI-generated clusters of tents next to the phrases are all the same. But Shah’s version is depicted from a higher, bird’s-eye view, with the snowy mountains casting deeper and longer shadows.
He said he was experimenting with a variety of Gaza-related AI imagery as a form of activism rather than for virality.
“My goal is not to be popular,” Shah told NPR. “I want justice for all the Palestinians out there.”
Shah says AI images spread faster
The probability of producing the exact same AI image twice is extremely slim.
In dozens of attempts to recreate the image using Microsoft’s Image Creator, NPR failed to suggest that the tool could create anything close to a viral visual. Most of the time, the tool struggled to spell “All eyes on Rafah” correctly, a limitation of many AI image generators, which tend to depict words that are misspelled or distorted in some way.
These are the results of Microsoft Image Creator for NPR, which, after being prompted, generated a photorealistic aerial photo of Rafa with the words “All eyes on Rafa” superimposed on the tent.
NPR/Microsoft Image Creator
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NPR/Microsoft Image Creator
Shah, who often shares social media posts highlighting the plight of Palestinians, said he noticed that real-life photos and videos of the war often have limited reach on Instagram.
“Artificial intelligence pictures can spread faster in a short period of time,” he said. “In the world of social media, we can’t show real images because that would subject the image to censorship and the user could be blocked,” Shah said.
Other activists have expressed similar concerns, claiming that graphic images showing the atrocities of the war in Gaza can be removed from platforms or suppressed through social media algorithms.
Some commentators criticized the meme for depicting a sanitized version of the war, turning the human horrors on the ground in Gaza into an easily shareable image of artificial intelligence.
Both Abukar and Shah rejected the idea, saying AI imagery could be a useful way to grab people’s attention and get them involved in the war effort in some way.
However, there is no agreement among them as to who created the viral image, which sparked discussions around the world about the veracity of online activism and reignited concerns that the internet is increasingly flooded with realistic depictions of artificial intelligence. focus on.
Shah blocked an NPR reporter when asked in a private message on Instagram about her claims that her images had been plagiarized.
