A photo that appears to show President Donald Trump kissing his 35-year-old assistant Natalie Harp on a golf course has gone viral in recent days. If you run the image through AI image detectors, you’re going to get a big shrug, with some even suggesting it’s real.
When Gizmodo asked Claude whether the image is real, it provided “signs that lean toward ‘real photo’,” including the “natural depth of field falloff” as well as the “consistent lighting direction and shadow behavior across the scene.”
Claude also noted that the “hands, fingers, and the golf club are anatomically consistent,” one of the telltale signs historically that an image could have been created with AI. The AI image creators have long had a problem with hands, sometimes generating too many or too few fingers.
Other AI chatbots like Microsoft’s Copilot and OpenAI’s ChatGPT had similar responses. Google’s Gemini said it didn’t contain the SynthID watermark, which is added to all of the images created with Google products, but that it might be AI-generated.
What’s the answer then? Is this really a photo of Trump kissing Harp, his right-hand woman who’s gotten the nickname of “human printer” since she prints off so many flattering articles and tweets for him? If you look a bit closer, you can see the one big tell that all the AI chatbots seem to be missing.
Do you see it? Yep, there appear to be six fingers on Harp’s hand, meaning this is likely an AI-generated image. However, we can’t definitively call it fake just yet. Why? Because there’s another version of the image circulating.
A low-resolution variation of the image has been doing the rounds as well, meaning that it’s entirely possible that someone took the low-resolution version and upscaled it to make it clearer, adding the telltale extra finger.
Wait a minute!
Is that Donald Trump kissing Natalie Harp at his golf course in Ireland over the weekend? pic.twitter.com/BC1TBSWtB2
— Lucas Sanders 👊🏽🔥🇺🇸 (@LucasSa56947288) September 15, 2026
This scenario is unlikely, given the fact that digital cameras don’t need to make blurry, pixelated images. But it’s a possibility. An unlikely one, but still a possibility. The more likely explanation is that the clearer AI fake was doing the rounds, and people started to add blur to hide the AI tells.
Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff of Georgia helped propel Natalie Harp into the public spotlight when he noted during a speech that Trump loved to travel with her. Ossoff never said anything about Trump having an affair with his assistant, but that’s how everyone in the MAGA media universe immediately took it and started clutching their pearls.
How on Earth could someone even begin to suggest that a serial philanderer like Trump would ever cheat on his wife? The man is clearly beyond reproach, if you ask his legion of supporters.
Detecting when an image has been made with AI is getting harder and harder as the tools to create fake photos get better. And we’re at the point where it’s sometimes impossible to definitively say whether an image is real. But thankfully we still live in a window where the AI image generators are making really basic mistakes, provided you look closer.
No, this photo probably isn’t real. But making that determination in the future is going to be even harder. And guys like Donald Trump are going to exploit that vulnerability. The president has repeatedly called real events fake and AI, something known as the Liar’s Dividend.
If we do get solid photographic proof of Trump with a mistress one day (at least one not named Stormy Daniels), you can bet good money that he’ll just say it’s AI anyway.
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