HISPI Project Cerebellum HISPI PROJECT CEREBELLUM

Purportedly AI-Manipulated Image Reported to Falsely Depict Taiwanese Politician Kao Chia-yu Posing With PRC Flag

December 25, 2025

Late in December 2025, a manipulated image surfaced online, portraying former Taiwanese legislator Kao Chia-yu seemingly before the PRC five-star flag. The image was created by altering an authentic photograph taken at Taiwan's New York representative office, switching the Republic of China flag for that of the PRC. Kao swiftly refuted the misleading image and cautioned about AI-driven disinformation and potential election manipulation. This incident underscores the need for responsible AI governance to minimize such occurrences and maintain trustworthy online environments.

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Matched TAIM controls

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

Alleged deployer
unknown-actors, unknown-disinformation-actors
Alleged developer
unknown-deepfake-technology-developers, unknown-ai-image-generator-developers
Alleged harmed parties
kao-chia-yu, general-public, general-public-of-taiwan, epistemic-integrity, national-security-and-intelligence-stakeholders

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/1320

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.

Pre-print on arXiv · Database snapshots & citation guide

We use weekly snapshots of the AIID for stable reference. For the official suggested citation of a specific incident, use the “Cite this incident” link on each incident page.