Czech Trikolora party used AI to add a crowd to rally photo

The deputy chairman of the Czech party Trikolora, Petr Štěpánek, removed a photo from the party's Facebook page showing a campaign event in the city of České Budějovice — it turned out that an AI had added a crowd of supporters to the image, which had been presented as genuine.

“I deleted it because I found out the photo had been edited. When I posted it, I didn't know that — I thought it was a real picture,” Štěpánek explained. According to him, the photo was sent to him by party colleagues, and no one warned him that it had been altered by AI. The image was posted on Saturday with the caption: “The election campaign is in full swing. This photo is from České Budějovice.” The photo, however, lacked the mandatory AI-use label that, under the rules, must accompany any post containing text, photos or video processed by artificial intelligence.

“It's blazingly obvious it's AI”

Political scientist Michal Malý of Charles University's Faculty of Social Sciences believes the episode above all reveals the party's amateurism in handling social media. “It's blazingly obvious that it's artificial intelligence,” he said, adding that the author most likely used a free, lower-quality model rather than a paid one. By adding dozens of people around the campaign stand, the party was trying to show that its meeting with voters in southern Czechia had drawn real interest. “The very fact that ten people showed up to the rally, and you draw in the rest, is embarrassing in itself,” Malý added.

Facebook users quickly spotted the trick

Commenters under the post didn't mince words and quickly exposed the fake. “What are these freaks in this photo?” one of them wrote. Another advised: “Great AI. Zoom in on the faces behind the stand.” A third joked in response that “the two-headed ones there are really something.”

The party's social media isn't run by a professional

For political parties, social media work is a top priority, and spending on running accounts grows every year. That's why Malý finds it unusual that at Trikolora this job falls to the deputy chairman — the party's second-ranking official, who should arguably be focused on political work instead. That Štěpánek runs the party's social media was confirmed by its chairwoman and sole MP, Zuzana Majerová, who entered the Chamber of Deputies on the SPD movement's list. “Hiring a student to run social media at a semi-professional level costs a couple of tens of thousands of crowns a year,” the political scientist noted, adding: “In a party of normal size, no one would have published anything like this in public.”

SPD had a similar scandal before

Politicians and parties today often use artificial intelligence, but usually in the form of stylised illustrations that make it immediately clear they're not depicting a real event. In the case of a photo passed off as a shot from a campaign event, AI interference can distort the public's sense of how many people actually showed up.

One of the best-known examples of AI use in Czech politics remains the SPD movement's posters from its 2024 regional and Senate election campaign. They showed a dark-skinned man with a blood-stained knife and the slogan “Foreign surgeons won't solve the doctor shortage.” Because of that material, the movement ended up in court: in June it was unlawfully fined three million crowns, but in September an appeals court overturned that ruling, and SPD was finally cleared.

Around Prague, based on reporting by novinky.cz