With the rise of digital art using artificial intelligence (AI) software, it has become increasingly difficult to tell what is real and what is fake. One particular image had the internet buzzing, as it appeared at first glance to be a real close-up of a bee's face.
According to Twitter user "Amazing Nature" that claims to "analyze and fact check to bring you the best in real genuine nature research" this is a "really cool macro shot of a bee!"
This picture raises some red flags, one of those being that bees have eyes that normally look like honeycombs under a microscope. According to photographer Rose-Lynn Fisher, who has used powerful scanning electron microscopes (SEMs) to capture the insect in extreme detail, her photos show the bee's multi-lensed compound eyes.
"In that first moment, when I saw its eye, I realized that the bees' eyes are composed of hexagons, which echo the structure of the honeycomb," she told the Smithsonian. "I stood there, just thinking about that, and how there are these geometrical patterns in nature that just keep on repeating themselves."
The image above does not show that detail in the bee's eyes.
When tracing the image source we found it on Adobe Stock, uploaded by a user named "mac" whose profile content consists entirely of digitally created images. The same image also popped up on Freepik, uploaded by "lazybonejr9," and tagged as an illustration. This user also has an account populated with digital illustrations.
Given that the image itself does not accurately depict a bee's eyes and we traced it to online accounts that generate images using AI technology, we rate this claim as "False."