Just the previous night, former President Donald Trump made a post on Truth Social, referencing the supposed impending executions of several women. The post included a collage featuring eight women in dramatic, soft-focus lighting. These images quickly sparked controversy as many suspected they were generated by artificial intelligence. “Trump is pleading with Iranian leaders not to execute eight AI-generated women. This is the most amusing thing I’ve encountered,” read one viral post on social media platform X.

Following Trump’s announcement, the Iranian state news agency Mizan swiftly countered his claims, branding him a liar. They stated, “Donald Trump, based on entirely false information, urged Iran to reverse the death sentences of eight women.” Mizan further clarified that some of these women had been released and others were facing prison, but not execution. They emphasized that Tehran had not made any concessions, implying the situation with the women remained unchanged.

The Iranian embassy’s account in South Africa, noted for its provocative posts among Iran’s state-affiliated accounts, wasted no time in responding with its own set of images featuring eight women.

According to Mahsa Alimardani, the associate director of the Technology Threats & Opportunities program at WITNESS, the collage Trump shared appears to be at least partially altered by AI, as reported by The Verge. However, the women depicted are real individuals. One of the women, Bita Hemmati, featured in the top right of the collage, had been in various news articles in right-leaning media recently. Hemmati has been sentenced to death by the Tehran Revolutionary Court for allegedly acting against the government on behalf of hostile entities, including the United States.

Alimardani identified six of the women: Bita Hemmati, Mahboubeh Shabani, Venus Hossein-Nejad, Golnaz Naraghi, Diana Taherabadi, and Ghazal Ghalandri. Two other women, Panah Movahedi and Ensieh Nejati, remain unverified. These six women participated in anti-government protests in January. Besides Hemmati, none of the others have reportedly been sentenced to death.

It’s not unexpected for Trump to handle facts carelessly, nor is it surprising for the Iranian regime to manipulate narratives to suit its agenda or mock genuine political prisoners to take jabs at the United States.

The additional wrinkle is that the account mocking Trump for coming to the rescue of “8 AI-generated women” is the very same one that landed South Korean president Lee Jae-myung in hot water when he quoted a misleading labeled video posted by that account. Israeli officials have accused the account of being “well-known for spreading disinformation.” The case of the sketchy Lee Jae-myung quote-post is a story of mingled truth and misinformation, where the post got facts very wrong, but the video — of Israeli Defense Forces soldiers shoving a limp body off a rooftop in Gaza — was real, documenting an event that possibly implicates Israeli forces in a violation of international law.

The case of the eight Iranian protesters also features that same mingling of fact and fiction into a fuzzy distortion that fuels an endless disputation of real human rights violations. Their lives have been reduced to glossy pixels and quote-dunks, the stuff of propaganda and parody. While known liars fight with each other on the internet about who these women are and what will happen to them, they — verifiably six of them, at least — remain real people who exist beyond the Iranian internet blackout.