Since Friday an image has been circulating on Bangladeshi social media showing people lying on mats on the sand at Cox’s Bazar, bags, luggage and pillows beside them. The claim attached to it is that hundreds of tourists, unable to find hotel rooms during the Durga Puja holiday, were forced to spend the night on the beach.
Prothom Alo’s fact check found that the image does not depict a real event. It was generated by artificial intelligence.
How far it travelled
The version that drove the story was posted on a Facebook page called Manju Ahmed, which has roughly 700,000 followers. The image shows several people lying down, a group sitting in a circle talking, and others standing.
The caption read: “Suffering in Cox’s Bazar! Unable to get a hotel room, we have made our bed by the sea under the open sky.”
By the time the fact check was published the post had passed 1,600 reactions, and the comments show that readers took it at face value. One wrote: “So many people’s whims, I am astonished. If you are going anyway, book the hotel in advance.”
That comment is the thing worth noticing. The image did not merely spread. It produced a round of public scolding directed at people who were never there.
What the image itself shows
Close inspection reveals unnatural distortion in several people’s hands and faces, and inconsistencies in the light and shadow across the frame.
Those two signatures are worth memorising, because they remain the most reliable free check available to anyone. Generative models still resolve hands badly, and they still fail to keep a single light source consistent across a scene with many figures. Look at the fingers; then look at which direction every shadow falls.
As part of the verification, four AI image detection tools were used, including Hive Moderation and Sight Engine. All indicated a strong probability that the image was AI-generated.
What the people who run the beach say
Detection scores are probabilistic, so the check did not stop there. Hotel owners and tourists were contacted directly.
Mukim Khan, general secretary of the Cox’s Bazar Marine Drive Hotel Resort Owners’ Association, told Prothom Alo that a situation in which tourists could not get a room and had to spend the night on the beach has not occurred in Cox’s Bazar in the past ten years. AI-generated images like this one, he said, are being spread to create confusion. No such event took place.
Nishad Zaman, superintendent of the Cox’s Bazar tourist police, said the AI-generated image had been shared widely on social media and was confusing tourists, who needed to stay alert. No such situation had developed on the beach.
Several similar pictures of people lying on the sand have circulated on Facebook and TikTok during the holiday crowds.
Why this one matters more than a hoax
This is not a celebrity deepfake or a political fabrication. It is a lie about hotel availability in a tourist town during peak season, and it carries straightforward commercial consequences: a family deciding not to travel, a resort fielding cancellations, a district’s reputation taking a knock in a week when its income depends on arrivals.
It also arrives at almost no cost. One prompt, one upload, a page that already has reach, and a plausible grievance — because the claim is the sort of thing that could happen, which is what carried it past a hundred thousand readers.
The practical rule for a photograph like this is short. Before sharing, ask who posted it and whether they were present. Enlarge the hands. Check whether every shadow agrees about where the sun is. And if the image is making a claim about a place, there is almost always somebody in that place who can be telephoned — which is, in the end, what settled this one.
Related: Google’s AI-detection portal, and what it cannot tell you.
