Update, 4:45 p.m. ET: The Minnesota Star Tribune has identified the ICE agent who killed Renee Good as Jonathan Ross. The Department of Homeland Security refused to confirm whether Ross was the ICE agent in a meandering statement to Gizmodo on Thursday but insisted the Star Tribune “should be absolutely ashamed of themselves for their reckless behavior, and they should delete their story immediately.” Our original story appears below.
An ICE agent shot and killed 37-year-old Renee Good in Minneapolis on Wednesday, just the latest example of federal authorities terrorizing communities with deadly force at the direction of President Donald Trump. The ICE agent can be seen shooting at Good’s car in three separate viral videos, though the shooter hasn’t yet been publicly identified. Internet sleuths are asking AI tools to remove the ICE agent’s face mask. The problem is that AI chatbots can’t do that with any accuracy.
Video from the scene of the shooting on Wednesday was tough to watch, but it instantly flooded all of the major social media platforms. The video was damning, appearing to show Good initially attempting to wave the ICE agents on before the masked men give conflicting orders. They first told her to move on, according to eyewitnesses who spoke with Minnesota Public Radio, before trying to get her out of the car. Video shows Good moved the car forward, with her wheels turned away from the agents, but one of the men can be seen shooting at the car multiple times.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem claimed that Good was trying to run over the ICE agents and committed an act of “domestic terrorism.” Vice President JD Vance called it “classic terrorism” on Thursday. Visual investigations from Bellingcat and the New York Times contradicted their account.
Fake ICE agents created with AI
Not long after the videos went viral, social media users on platforms like X started to ask the AI chatbot Grok to unmask the agent who shot Good. Fake images created by unknown AI tools also spread on sites like TikTok and Instagram.
But AI simply can’t do that. It just creates an image from scratch that doesn’t show the actual face of that person. It’s roughly as useful as picking a random photo from the internet.
Some of the images have gotten enormous traction, attracting over a million views in a single tweet, and have spread widely across many networks, driven by an ignorance of what AI tools are capable of generating.
@Grok is this true
Unfortunately, AI is also not good at identifying whether images are created with AI. The image above is not real, but when Gizmodo asked Gemini whether it was created by AI, the chatbot said it wasn’t.
Google recently introduced the SynthID watermark detector in Gemini, but that’s only useful when the image was actually created with a Google tool like Nano Banana Pro. The watermark is invisible to the naked eye, but Gemini has no way to definitely rule on an image created with a different company’s tools.
The image above is AI but was not created with Google, and Gemini replied: “Based on my analysis, the image is likely a real photograph, not AI-generated.” AI detection software similarly struggles with whether text has been created with artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT, leading to false accusations against students who swear they didn’t get AI to write their papers.
Steve Grove isn’t an ICE agent
Unmasking people is simply beyond the capabilities of AI tools at the moment. These fake images are currently going viral, and people appear to be running them through facial recognition and getting false positives. One common name that’s cropped up on sites like Reddit and X is “Steve Grove,” a real person who owns a gun shop in Springfield, Missouri.
The Springfield Daily Citizen spoke with the real Steve Grove, who said that his Facebook account has been inundated with messages. “I never go by ‘Steve,’” Grove told the news outlet on Thursday. “And then, of course, I’m not in Minnesota. I don’t work for ICE, and I have, you know, 20 inches of hair on my head, but whatever.”
Steve Grove is the name of the CEO of the Star Tribune newspaper in Minneapolis, which may be where this claim originated.
Fake Renee Good images
Other fake images created on Wednesday tried to show Good in her car before the shooting. One AI-generated image spread widely on Bluesky in a cropped form, but also appeared on Facebook in a wider shot. Notably, the fake image doesn’t show anyone behind the wheel, with the woman supposedly trying to represent Good sitting in the passenger’s seat. The cropped version has been flipped so that it appears more like she’s in the driver’s seat.
Most disturbingly, one X user took a screenshot of Good, seen slumped over lifeless in her car, and told Grok to put her in a bikini. Grok dutifully complied, mirroring the activity of the AI chatbot making non-consensual sexualized images of women and young girls in recent weeks. It’s a federal crime to create child sexual abuse material, but Grok continues to do it at the request of users.
AI can’t do that
We’ve seen this reliance on AI as an investigative tool over and over again in the past year. When security camera images of the suspect in the Charlie Kirk shooting were released by the FBI, people ran them through AI tools in an attempt to get a clearer picture of the person without sunglasses. When a suspect was eventually arrested, some people were confused because Tyler Robinson’s mugshot didn’t look anything like the AI-altered images they had seen circulating on social media.
When Trump appeared ill over Labor Day weekend last year, social media tried to “enhance” grainy photos of the president using generative artificial intelligence tools. The enhancement added a gigantic lump to his head.
But AI is just introducing flaws, not creating a clearer picture. All you need to do to understand what’s happening is to look at the flag on Trump’s hat. It didn’t create a more accurate American flag. The AI looked for patterns and extrapolated from those patterns, sharpening the focus but not creating a more accurate picture of reality.
Old-fashioned misinformation
And you can’t always blame internet sleuths exclusively for some of the dumbest comments in these situations. Greg Kelly, an anchor at Newsmax, tried to suggest on Wednesday that the stickers on the back of Good’s car were somehow suspicious.
“TOTALLY JUSTIFIED SHOOTING!!!!!! NOT EVEN CLOSE!!! (Curious about these Stickers on the Back of the Car. Various WACK JOB groups and affiliations? )” Kelly wrote on X.
TOTALLY JUSTIFIED SHOOTING!!!!!! NOT EVEN CLOSE!!! (Curious about these Stickers on the Back of the Car. Various WACK JOB groups and affiliations? ) pic.twitter.com/3xng119z7m
— Greg Kelly (@gregkellyusa) January 7, 2026
Those stickers obviously look like stickers from the National Parks. And a report from the Associated Press suggests she was simply dropping off her son at school and got caught up in the middle of the ICE incident, according to her ex-husband. There’s no evidence that Good was some kind of left-wing radical. And even if she was, that wouldn’t have justified her killing.
Good had two children from her first marriage, ages 15 and 12, according to Minnesota Public Radio, and a 6-year-old son from her second marriage. A GoFundMe fundraising campaign for Good’s surviving wife and son has raised over $600,000 at the time of this writing.
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