An AI-generated image goes viral as a railway station in Kerala is specially decorated to welcome the Onam festival.

This is an AI-generated image, not the specially decorated Kerala railway station and train for Onam festival

Onam is Kerala’s national festival, lasting ten days and featuring pageants, boat races, flower carpet competitions, and a variety of tourist attractions. Flowers and flower carpets are an important feature of this festival. The entire state is preparing to welcome Onam when flowers and flower fields are ablaze with colour. It arrives in August and September. This year it falls on August 29th.

In this scenario a picture of a specially decorated railway station in Kerala to welcome Onam is going viral on social media. The picture of the train passing through the flowers specially planted on the track for Onam celebrations is widely circulated. 

The video is circulating with the caption “This is a picture of a railway station in Kerala specially decorated for Onam. The flowers near the tracks are real and have been planted specially for the occasion”.

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Fact Check- 

We started our investigation by running a reverse image search on Google; the results led us to an image similar to the train in the viral image. It was found on pngtree.com website. Colorful Taiwan local train also specified with the picture.

Keeping this in mind, we closely examined the viral image it became clear that the circulating picture was made by editing the picture of the train from Kyoto, Japan.

Upon closer examination of the image doing the rounds on social media, the board Kasargod-Thiruvananthapuram was revealed. We contacted Railway Division Office in Thiruvananthapuram for additional confirmation. Sr. PRO Southern Railway Shebi clarified us that the picture was fake and such a railway station and train were not from Kerala. Thiruvananthapuram Division, Southern Railway confirmed it on Twitter also. It states “Fake news alert! An edited picture of a colourful train is circulating in social media with a claim that is from a railway station in Kerala. The claim is false. The train in the image is from Kyoto, Japan. Do not fall for fake news!”.

And when the people standing on one side of the train in the picture were subjected to a closer inspection, it became clear that the same kind of edited pictures. On further inspection a watermark of Copper&black was also found on one side of the image.

With this indication, we conducted further research and discovered that this is the work of Aneesh Chakkottil, an employee of the Copper&Black advertising agency in the UAE.  We discovered that the viral image was an AI generated image from one of his posts.

With this hint we made further search and found that this is the creation of  the employee of Copper&black advertising company in UAE named.  From one of his post we found that viral image was an AI generated image.

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Conclusion- 

Fact Crescendo found that the viral picture is an AI-generated image, not the specially decorated Kerala railway station and train for the Onam festival.