Muhammed Shami and Sania Mirza with a trophy; Is it a real image?

Claim

Many deepfake images were shared online by users after India clinched ICC Champions Trophy 2025. An image of Indian pacer Muhammed Shami with ace tennis legend Sania Mirza with the a trophy was shared widely by many users. 

On March 9, India won the title clash against New Zealand in the ICC Men’s World Cup final. The Indian team crowned the champion of the cricket after the wait of one decade when it won last time in 2013.

Link

The archived link can be found here.

Fact check

To authenticate the image, firstly, the DFRAC probe searched the official handles of both sports persons. It gave no positive result.  The official handles of BCCI and ICC also didn’t provide the desired result.

Then the image was analyzed using the ‘HIVEMODERATION’ tool. The result showed that the image is  likely to contain 97.4% AI-generated content.

The watermark of GrokAI is visible on the left bottom of the image. Grok is the generative AI bot from X, formerly Twitter.

Result

The viral image of Muhammed Shami with Sania Mirza with a trophy is AI generated and no such image is shared by any credible sources. Thus the image is fake.