WHAT WAS CLAIMED
An image shows a police officer in hospital after being shot in the Bondi Beach attack.
OUR VERDICT
False. The image is AI-generated.
AAP FACTCHECK - A social media image of a police officer in hospital after being shot in the head in the Bondi Beach terror attack is AI-generated.
Google's artificial intelligence (AI) detection tool indicates that the purported image of Probationary Constable Jack Hibbert was generated using the tech firm's AI tools.
The image has been shared by an engagement-bait Facebook page focused on Australian news, which lists a US address but is really being run by two users in Vietnam.
The 22-year-old officer was among scores of people injured or killed when two gunmen opened fire on a Jewish celebration at the famous beach on December 14, 2025.
Cons Hibbert lost vision in one eye as a result of his injuries, but he was released from hospital on December 23.
Several Facebook posts have recently shared a collage of purported images of him since his release from hospital.
The photos of him crossing a road and sitting beside a dog were published by The Daily Mail Australia and other media outlets.
However, a fourth image purportedly showing Cons Hibbert lying in a hospital bed with his head bandaged is an AI-generated fake.
When uploaded to Google Images, the "About this image" tool identifies the image as being "Made with Google AI".
This is because it contains a "Synth ID watermark" that Google embeds in images generated by its AI tools.
The digital watermarks cannot be detected by the human eye but can be identified in the content's pixels, according to Google.
The image also includes a logo from the Vietnam-based Facebook page, Cryptic Revelations, which has posted the image multiple times.
AAP FactCheck was only able to find a single genuine image of the officer in hospital, in which his face is blurred on a GoFundMe donation page set up for him.
Engagement-bait operations on Facebook publish AI-generated text and images to drive traffic to external websites that are often laden with scams, ads and viruses.
AAP FactCheck has also previously debunked AI-generated images of another Bondi attack survivor, Arsen Ostrovsky.
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