Presidential election 2025. Karol Nawrocki in the White House. “Which photo is real”?

The visit of Karol Nawrocki in the United States is underway. On May 1, the candidate of Law and Justice for President was one of the guests of the National Day of Prayer in the Rose White House. There, he talked for a moment, among others, with the Secretary of State Marco Rubio. After the celebrations met with President Donald Trump.

PiS MEP Adam Bielan on May 1 published on his profile on the website X a photo of Nawrocki from the ceremony in the rose garden. It shows how the PiS candidate for president stands among the sitting guests celebrations. Most of them are facing the stage or rostrum. Nawrocki is facing the audience, as if he was greeing the guests with a nod's head or intended to take a place in one of the first rows. “Karol Nawrocki visiting the White House” – wrote MEP in a post with a photo.

Post PiS policy was made available by one of the anonymous users of the X website. At the same time, it even published an identical photo, but with one important difference. In the place in Nawrocki you can see another man standing in a similar pose. The man is at the carcass, he has a black jacket, a light blue shirt and a blue tie. We were unable to determine who he was. This information is also not provided by the author of the entry. “Which photo is real?” – she asked in the post. Her entry was displayed over 80,000 times.

The list of the same two photos later was published by another anonymous Internet user. “I have a problem – on the left a real photo on the right photo 'right' – which is true?” – he asked in the post. He added a photo with Nawrocki on the right, and on the left a version with another man.

The list of photos caused a hot discussion of Internet users. Some believed that the photo with an unknown man was the original, and the version with Nawrocki was a conversion. “Bielan cried as he pasted”; “He pasted Batyr?”; “Fotoshop … Pasting for little ones from PiS” – they commented (original entries). Some on this occasion referred to nickname Karol Nawrocki – Tadeusz Batyr – under which he published “Confession of Nikos from behind the grave”, i.e. the biography of Gangster Nikodem Skotarczak.

Look: I read the book Batyr vel Nawrocki so that you don't have to

The next ones argued that the photo with Nawrocki was the original. “The first is AI, with Nawrocki is real”; “Those without Nawrocki is a poorly made fake. The fat man was pasted poorly. The lady from the 1st row lost her face and next to the sitting guest's hand”; “However, it is with Nawrocki, the second is a modification in AI …”; “Of course it is true with Nawrocki,” they said in the comments.

Few estimated that both photos are authentic. “Both are real genius”; “Both people have different heads so they are two different moments”; “Both are probably Legit”; “Unfortunately for Poland, they are all real.”

So we checked who was right.

There are many indications that the version of the photo with an unknown man is a modification taken using a tool based on artificial intelligence. What specifically speaks for it? In the lower right corner of the photo there is a watermark with the name “grok” – it is chatbot based on generative artificial intelligence, developed by XAI and associated with the X service. Such a sign appears in paintings generated or processed by this tool. This solution was introduced to facilitate the identification of content created by AI.

Another tips are errors typical of artificial intelligence that arise when generating a photo or rewriting an existing one. And so the man standing in the place of Nawrocki has an unnaturally long left arm and we do not see his hand. What's more, the arm of a sitting man in a black jacket (lower right corner) disappears here. His arm was covered with Nawrocki's hand in the first photo published by the PiS MEP.

On the version with Nawrocki, you can clearly see the woman's face with bangs and glasses on the top of the head. On the version with an unknown man, her face “melts”, even though the head remains in the same place. What's more, the man's glasses in a light brown plaid jacket look distorted.

A photo with Nawrocki is a much better quality than its alternative version. White stars on the US flags are clearly visible in the upper left. On the version with an unknown man they are very distorted. In turn, the leaves on the shrubs in the central part of the frame look unnatural – they give the impression that a fragment of plants has been copied and repeatedly reproduced. Meanwhile, on the version where Nawrocki can be seen, the bushes look much more natural.

The tools available in the network help in identifying the original photo. According to Hive Moderation The probability that graphics with an unknown man is the work of artificial intelligence is as much as 99.9 percent. Meanwhile, for the version of the photo with Nawrocki, it is only 0.4 percent.

Similar tool Sightngine estimates that a photo with unknown men at 96 percent. It was created using artificial intelligence. For the version with Nawrocki, this probability was only 1 percent. It seems that the GROK tool asked to rewrite the photo – i.e. inserting another character in the place of Nawrocki – made slight changes in the original photo and significantly worsened its quality.

May 1 on the official profile of Karol Nawrocki on the website x published Entry with four photos from the ceremony in the rose garden. On the first of them Nawrocki stands forward to the audience, his back to the podium. In the background you can see the same flags of the United States and bushes that appear in the photo made available earlier by MEP Adam Bielan, and then converted by Internet users. A round military cap on the head of one of the guests behind Nawrocki is also correct. In the second photo Nawrocki sits in the second row among the invited guests. This suggests that the photograph published by Bielan could be taken when Nawrocki took his place.