Never Forget, AI Slop Is Polluting 9/11 History on the Internet as We Speak

Welles Crowther became known as the Man in the Red Bandana after stories spread about his heroism on September 11, 2001. Now, an AI-generated image purporting to show Crowther rescuing people from the World Trade Center is going viral—the latest example of how fabricated images could distort our collective memory of 9/11 for generations.

The 24-year-old Crowther was working on the 104th floor of the South Tower of the World Trade Center when a plane struck on that fateful day. Crowther, an equities trader, was also a volunteer firefighter and is credited with helping save the lives of at least a dozen people. He reportedly helped guide people to the lone functioning stairwell and even carried some people down the stairs himself. He died when the South Tower collapsed.

President Donald Trump awarded Crowther the Presidential Medal of Freedom on Tuesday and, as always, the president had to make it about himself, insisting he doesn’t like that the man in the red bandana had become much more famous than him.

“The Man in the Red Bandana. Have you heard of him? He’s become more famous than me. I don’t like it. Very unhappy. But he’s become much more famous than me.”

Crowther’s story of heroism is very real according to multiple witnesses, but the image that’s going viral of Crowther isn’t. There are no known photos of Crowther in action on September 11th.

One major problem with the proliferation of AI images is that AI image detectors can be unreliable. Gizmodo ran the image above through ChatGPT and asked if it was created with AI. The response from ChatGPT: “It very likely is not AI-generated. It appears to be a genuine historical photograph rather than an AI-created image.”

The explanation from ChatGPT went on to insist that the image has features “you’d expect from a real news photograph” and that it’s “consistent with photographs taken during the evacuation of the World Trade Center after the September 11 attacks.”

When Gizmodo uploaded the image to Grok, the chatbot claimed that it was “a well-known photograph from the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks,” but when pressed on whether it was authentic, Grok finally admitted it might be fake.

Claude said the image was a photo but likely a dramatization and not created with AI. When I asked Claude to do a reverse image search, the chatbot said it “confirmed” the image was from a documentary or similar that depicted the events and wasn’t made with AI: “So to directly answer your question: no, this doesn’t look AI-generated — it’s a reenactment/dramatization photo…”

The definitive documentary on Crowther, Man In Red Bandana (2017), does feature an actor very briefly recreating some of his actions while saving people , but it doesn’t match up with the AI image that’s currently going viral. The actor playing Crowther in that documentary is wearing a white t-shirt, not a button-up shirt and tie.

When we tried Gemini and asked if the image had the SynthID watermark, which is added to all images created with Google’s AI tools, the chatbot said that it couldn’t check that. Google opened up SynthID detection to all Gemini users last year , so that was a weird claim.