AI Tools Reportedly Used to Fabricate Image of 5,000-Naira Nigerian Banknote Featuring President Bola Tinubu

January 26, 2025

In late January 2025, an image of a purportedly newly issued 5,000-naira banknote featuring President Bola Tinubu circulated on Nigerian social media. The Central Bank of Nigeria denied the claim, and fact-checkers suggested that the image was likely fabricated using AI tools, as evident by the Grok watermark. This incident underscores the importance of trustworthy AI practices and HISPI Project Cerebellum TAIM's role in implementing guardrails for safe and secure AI use.

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Matched TAIM controls

Suggested mapping from embedding similarity (not a formal assessment). Browse all TAIM controls

MAP 1.6 — similarity 0.629, rank 1. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MEASURE 2.6 — similarity 0.624, rank 2. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MEASURE 2.5 — similarity 0.624, rank 3. TAIM detail and related incidents →

Alleged deployer: unknown-x-(twitter)-users, unidentified-social-media-users
Alleged developer: xai
Alleged harmed parties: public-trust-in-the-naira, general-public-of-nigeria, central-bank-of-nigeria

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/1049

Data source

Incident data is from the AI Incident Database (AIID).

When citing the database as a whole, please use:

McGregor, S. (2021) Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-21). Virtual Conference.

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