‘All eyes on Rafah’ is the most viral AI meme on Instagram. 2 artists are claiming credit. : NPR
The image on the right was created by Zila Abka in February. She says she created it using Microsoft’s Image Creator. On the left is a viral image that Amirul Shah said he also created using an AI image generator.
Image created by Amirul Shah/AI and Zila Abka/Microsoft Image Creator
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Image created by Amirul Shah/AI and Zila Abka/Microsoft Image Creator
Two Malaysians 900 miles apart both claim credit for a composite photo of Gaza that has become the most viral image ever created by AI, highlighting the complexities of authorship and rights ownership in an online landscape increasingly flooded with artificial intelligence-generated content.
The story behind the “all eyes on Rafah” photo, which has been shared some 50 million times on Instagram and other platforms, likely begins at the northern tip of the Southeast Asian island of Borneo.
There, in February, Zila Abka was at home playing with Microsoft’s AI Image Creator tool.
Abka is a 39-year-old science teacher and AI art hobbyist. She is also a pro-Palestinian activist. She wanted to create a piece of political art depicting people sheltering in camps in the Gazan city of Rafah.
Zila Abka is a high school teacher in Malaysia. She is active in the Facebook group Remind Malaya, which brings together mostly Malaysian AI artists to show off their work.
Zila Abka
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Zila Abka
After the phrase “all eyes on Rafah” started going viral, Abka said she wrote a prompt for the AI tool to create an image with the phrase spelled out with white tents amid rows of other dense tents. These words became a rallying cry after representatives of the World Health Organization used them to draw attention to the situation in the region where hundreds of thousands of displaced people have fled.
When Microsoft’s Image Creator presented an image, Abka placed two watermarks on it: One watermark indicated it was created by AI; another said she was creative.
She likes it. So she shared a post on February 14 in her language – Malay – to the Facebook group The one who reminds Malayaa gathering place for about 250,000 people, mostly Malaysians, to share AI-generated art, sometimes about the war in Gaza.
“I want to spread the word and highlight this issue, and hope that people will do whatever they can to show solidarity with the people of Gaza right now,” Abka told NPR.
Akba Previously, he had not yet spoken about the implementation of the image.
Abka: ‘I thought this was mine’ but the watermark is gone
From there, she basically forgot about it — until last week, when she saw a similar image on Instagram, which went viral among her followers. an Israeli attack in the city killed dozens of people and drew worldwide condemnation.
But the image has been changed. Her watermark is gone. And the image has been expanded to include snow-capped mountains towering above the tents, an almost surreal touch, an AI simulation of Gaza’s Middle Eastern landscape.
Zila Abka created this image in February.
Zila Abka/Microsoft Image Builder
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Zila Abka/Microsoft Image Builder
At first, she felt insulted because someone had washed her image and removed her name from it. Additionally, she was initially worried that the “AI-generated” disclaimer was missing just as tens of millions of people were resharing it across the internet.
She zoomed in to examine each letter and each corner of the viral image. She concluded that it must be hers.
“Everything about the word structure and the arrangement of the ‘tents’ is the same, except for the extension,” she said. “When I saw it, I thought, yeah, I think this is mine.”
But her annoyance about not getting credit quickly dissipated.
“I don’t think any AI image created belongs to anyone at all,” Abka said.
Indeed, the US Copyright Office has repeatedly discarded object copyright protection for AI-generated images because they lack human authorship, placing AI images in a legal gray area.
However, it is Abka’s unique reminder that evokes the image. That would count for something, she said, although galvanizing support for Gaza has always been her main motivation.
“If the purpose is to spread awareness,” Abka said of the version of the image that went viral, “then I think I should thank that person.”
The person behind the account ‘Shahv4012’
Amirul Shah is a university student and photographer in Malaysia. The image he created of “all eyes on Rafah” has been shared nearly 50 million times on Instagram.
Amirul Shah
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Amirul Shah
That person is Amirul Shah, known as Shahv4012 on Instagram. He is also Malaysian.
The two people did not know each other and had never contacted each other.
Abka believes he took her photo, edited it and created an Instagram “template,” which has since gone viral on social media, attracting nearly 50 million shares on Instagram and millions more on other social media platforms.
Abka claims that Shah cropped her image just above the watermark, then edited it with a tool that used AI to expand and re-envision the photo’s background. She believes this because she tried it herself on her own AI rendering and got very similar results to the viral image.
Shah’s images have their own watermark along with his photography-dedicated Instagram account tag, @chaa.my_, giving the impression that the whole thing is his original work.
Amirul Shah added images he created to an Instagram template that was amplified by celebrities like Dua Lipa and Bella Hadid.
Image generated by Amirul Shah/AI
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Image generated by Amirul Shah/AI
When Shah was interviewed, he denied copying Abka’s work. Instead, he shared a different version of events.
Shah, a 21-year-old university student in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia’s capital, has not previously spoken out about his background.
A photography enthusiast, Shah, said he was recently testing an AI image generator. He thought he used it Microsoft’s Image Creator, the same service Abka used, but he claimed he couldn’t remember.
When he added it to an Instagram “template,” it went viral around the world as influencers and celebrities like Dua Lipa and Bella Hadid amplified it to their millions of followers.
The image looks eerily similar to Abka’s, but he claims that he had never even seen a photo of Abka before making his own.
However, the size of the words, the position of each letter, and the AI-generated tent clusters next to the phrase were all identical. But Shah’s version is depicted from a higher aerial perspective, with deeper and longer shadows cast by the snow-capped mountains.
He said he was trying out all kinds of AI images related to Gaza as a form of activism and not for the purpose of going viral.
“My intention was not to be famous,” Shah told NPR. “I want to defend justice for all the Palestinians who were there.”
Shah said AI images spread faster
Technologists say that creating the exact same AI image twice is extremely unlikely.
In dozens of attempts to recreate the image using Microsoft’s Image Creator, NPR was unable to prompt the tool to produce an image that closely resembled the viral image. In most cases, the tool had difficulty spelling “All eyes on Rafah” correctly, a limitation of many AI image generators, which tend to describe words with exact errors. described or deformed in some way.
These are the results generated for NPR by Microsoft’s Image Creator after being prompted to create a realistic-looking aerial photo of Rafah, with the phrase “all eyes on Rafah” superimposed in the middle tents.
NPR/Microsoft Image Generator
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NPR/Microsoft Image Generator
Shah, who regularly shares social media posts highlighting the plight of Palestinians, said he noticed that candid photos and videos of the war tend to have limited access on Instagram.
“Pictures from AI can spread faster in a short time,” he said. Shah said another problem was that he had his graphic images of war removed by Instagram for violating the platform’s policies. He said he was aware that repeated violations could mean “users could be blocked,” he said.
Felix Simon, a researcher at Oxford University who studies the impact of AI on public discourse, said images generated by artificial intelligence were much less likely to go viral. compared to other factors.
“The simplicity of the slogan, the symbolism of its work, the timing and political context and the fact that it was shared by celebrities,” said Simon, adding that “the lack of Graphic content makes it less likely to be taken down, which also helps.”
It’s a concern that has been echoed by other activists who have declared Graphic images show how brutal the war in Gaza can be REMOVE off platforms or blocked by social media algorithms.
Some commentators criticized the meme for depicting a sanitized version of war, turning the human horror on the ground in Gaza into an easily shareable AI image.
Both Abka and Shah dismissed that idea, saying AI images could be a useful way to get people’s attention and get them involved in the fight in some way.
However, there is still no consensus among them as to who created the viral image that has spurred discussion around the world about the authenticity of online activism and renewed attention on today’s internet. increasingly rife with realistic-looking AI depictions.
When asked to send a direct message on Instagram in response to Abka’s claim that her image had been copied, Shah blocked an NPR reporter.
