Yesterday, Giorgia Meloni posted to X an AI-generated photo of herself wearing only lingerie. The Italian prime minister published the image to warn others about how easy it is to create perfectly believable images and videos. Her warning: Never believe anything you see without thoroughly fact-checking it.
After all, we live in the end of reality.
“Deepfakes are a dangerous tool, because they can deceive, manipulate, and hit anyone,” Meloni said on X. “I can defend myself. Many others don’t.”
She is right, even though the image is not technically a deepfake. It’s a fully AI-generated photo that features her face. Unlike early deepfakes, which simply switched the face of one human in a base source photo with the face of another human, generative AI can use different components—like real faces, bodies, places, voices, and sounds—to create a 100% new synthetic media.
This process makes its true nature virtually, if not completely, undetectable: Since you can’t reverse-search and match the base image to an original source on the web, you could believe it is original (and real).
Meloni has already sued two men for creating a deepfake porn video of her in 2024. This time around, she joked that the fakes look “a lot” better than she does and posted the image as a very 2026 PSA. “This is why a rule should always apply: Check before believing, and believe before sharing. Because today it happens to me; tomorrow it can happen to anyone,” she wrote.
Meloni showed courage by putting herself out there, but more must be done than doling out advice. We are way past the point of education. The world needs action.
