Reported by The Verge AI
In the era of easy AI fakery, edited paparazzi photos are a reminder that not everything is what it seems.
Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and actor Jason Statham have a distinctive feature in common: They’re both famously bald, and that definitely hasn’t changed in the last few days. However, there are some images of the two men circulating around X , Threads , and Bluesky in which they both have substantially more hair than their usual shaved look, which in Bezos’ case appears to be very freshly transplanted. It’s all just photo editing fakery, AI or otherwise.
More from the original report
It’s unclear how viral these posts are , but they’re prevalent enough that a few members of the Verge team have encountered them in their social media feeds. Some people who shared them claimed (or were seemingly fooled into believing) that Bezos and Statham had undergone hair transplant surgery. Generative AI tools have made this kind of photo manipulation or outright creation more accessible and convincing, and because AI labeling solutions on social media broadly suck at flagging this fakery, it’s easy to be misled unless you’re wary of everything you see online. In a world where social media shitposters can turn engagement into a revenue stream, they’re not going to stop churning out attention-grabbing fabricated nonsense anytime soon.
We don’t know if AI tools were used to make the follicled Bezos and Statham edits — none of the images I tested flagged for Content Credentials or SynthID markers. We also can’t fully establish when they were first posted or who made them, but they are definitely fake, and it only took me a couple of minutes to confirm it.
In both cases, I ran the photos through Google’s reverse image search tool. For the Bezos debunk, I found photographs of him in a similar background environment and wearing the exact same outfit (with, yes, no hair) that included a watermarked image credit at the bottom left. Searching for the credit then led me to the original…