The Thai lie: viral "drag queen drug bust" turns out to be AI-generated fake

The story of a team of cops dressed up as drag queens for a drug raid has been uncovered as an AI-generated hoax, Thai police have admitted, highlighting the difficulty media face when "disinformation" comes from an official source.

The too-good-to-be true image shared on Tha Luang police station’s Facebook page last week made for an irresistible story that caught the imagination of news outlets around the world.

It pictured five men and one woman – all wearing colourful sequined dresses – surrounding the drug dealer they had caught while undercover.

The New York Post and several UK titles including Telegraph, Sun, Mirror, GB News and Express, all published a story based on the image, which went viral around the world after being widely reported as a real sting operation.

UK tabloid the Daily Star’s print edition ran the story on its front page with the headline “Ladyboys in Blue” while The Sun reported how “The burly crew of five men and one woman slipped into skin tight sequins and feathers for the covert mission in Thailand.”

However, a police spokesperson later admitted that it was AI-generated and has updated its page to show the fake and real images beside each other.

Both photos feature the blurred out image of the suspect they arrested – which is said to have been a genuine arrest – although the woman appears to have been made up entirely and does not appear in the updated picture.

When AI fakes come from an official source

The original story appears to be the work of an overzealous administrator of the Tha Luang police station Facebook page, who reportedly wanted to show a more humorous side of policing to make the public “more comfortable approaching officers.”

The truth was uncovered by a Thailand-based agency editor who investigated the story after the Facebook post began trending locally.

Applying the same humorous tone, police then shared the un-doctored photo alongside the caption: “We didn’t want to go out and arrest him, it’s a waste of costume rental."

"Common sense would dictate that four middle-aged men in dresses standing in a line of carnival dancers is hardly undercover."

Thailand-based news agency editor

While the story was a tabloid editor’s dream, what prompted many to believe it was authentic is that it came from an official source – the police themselves – and was seemingly put out as a genuine news story.

The episode highlights how difficult it can be to verify AI-generated images when they are distributed by trusted institutions. Rather than a typical case of malicious disinformation, the image appears to have stemmed from an attempt at humor that was later mistaken for a real event.

However, the agency editor who spoke to Press Gazette was not as forgiving: “Common sense would dictate that four middle-aged men in dresses standing in a line of carnival dancers is hardly undercover."

“It’s also not protocol to ever have civilians in the mug shot pictures, so the female dancer sitting there immediately rings alarm bells,” they added.

However The Daily Mail – which also mistakenly reported the original story and later published an updated version – pointed out that Bangkok police dressed up as a dragon earlier this year to arrest a suspect accused of stealing valuable Buddhist artifacts during the Lunar New Year.

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