Image of Thai PM-elect with South African businessman is AI-generated

As Thailand geared up for its second general elections in three years on February 8, 2026, a synthetic image of Prime Minister Anutin Charnvirakul dining with a South African businessman whom a report has accused of laundering money for scam networks surfaced in posts discussing the two men’s purported ties. The Thai leader — whose conservative party claimed victory in the polls — has previously said he had “casual” meetings with Benjamin Mauerberger after genuine photos of the pair together in 2014 surfaced online. However, an analysis using Google’s SynthID tool found the circulating image was AI-generated.

The image of Anutin at a dinner table with Mauerberger, also known as Ben Smith, and three other women spread in a February 7 Facebook post from a page called “CSI LA”, which frequently shares claims about corruption amongst Thai officials.

“Ben is everything to you. Everything revolves around Ben and Ben appears everywhere. Ben has been involved with Thai politics for more than 20 years,” reads the Thai-language caption on the image, which is timestamped “OCT 14 ’05”.

The post surfaced on the eve of Thailand’s general election on February 8, which the conservative Anutin claimed he had won after television stations projected his Bhumjaithai party would be by far the largest in parliament (archived link).

Thailand’s border dispute with Cambodia, which erupted into open fighting in July and December, was forefront in the minds of many voters, with analysts saying a wave of nationalism propelled Anutin to victory.

However, Anutin and other high-ranking Thai politicians and business figures had been plagued by a December 2025 leak of photos showing them with Mauerberger, whom a newsletter called Whale Hunting has accused of facilitating money laundering and transnational scam operations (archived here and here).

Opposition lawmakers questioned whether Mauerberger’s access to elite circles helped shield him from prosecution, but Anutin denied any connection with the businessman and said the encounters were incidental (archived here and here).

Mauerberger denied the allegations against him and dismissed them as “fiction created with the sole intention of destroying” him and his family (archived link). He has taken legal action against a Thai opposition MP and a journalist behind the Whale Hunting newsletter (archived here and here).

Other Facebook and TikTok posts shared the image of Anutin and Mauerberger alongside captions suggesting the two have long been in contact.

However, the image contains visual irregularities indicative of AI generation, including a wine glass whose stem appears slightly bent and a spoon that seems to disappear into the table’s surface.

AFP ran the image through Google’s SynthID detector, a tool designed to identify AI-generated content (archived link).

The system indicated with a “Very High” confidence that the image was created using Google’s AI tools.

Anutin publicly denied the photo’s authenticity hours after it surfaced online (archived link).

“I can assuredly say it’s an AI photo,” Anutin said on February 7, 2026 at the Bhumjaithai headquarters in Bangkok.

Anutin added that if the timestamp were accurate, the image was taken in 2005 — more than 20 years ago — when he would “look much younger.”

The genuine photos of Anutin with Mauerberger that were leaked in December were taken in 2014. The Thai leader said he only had a “brief conversation” with the businessman and later exchanged greetings with him at social events.

AFP has previously debunked other misinformation related to polls in Thailand and offers an online course on tackling election misinformation.