Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
A widely circulated image of a “Free Palestine” tub of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream is fake. It was made using ChatGPT.
The picture shows a carton of ice cream with two smiling children wearing kaffiyehs, and standing next to a plate of fish. Along with other faked images of pro-Palestine Ben & Jerry’s packaging, including one labelled “From the River to Sea,” it’s been doing the rounds on social media — and attracting both approval and outrage.
However, the image was in fact created and posted by pro-Palestinian Instagram user @iampocoloco.
“I just had ChatGPT create this because I thought it’d look sweet,” he wrote.
Fact-checking organization Polifact ran the photo through programs that identify whether images have been generated with artificial intelligence. WasItAI concluded that it was created with AI, with Hive Moderation finding that the chance it was AI-generated was 98.2%.
Meanwhile, fact-checker NewsGuard checked through Ben & Jerry’s menu of flavors and social media accounts without finding any flavors referring to Palestine or Israel.
However, this didn’t stop internet users sharing the image. One pro-Israel X user, @VividProwess, asked if it was real and posted that the ice cream maker is openly supporting terrorism, while TikTok user shewritestales wrote that the poets and novelists in Gaza are proud of their support.
Ben & Jerry’s ice cream is sold in Israel by a completely independent firm, Ben & Jerry’s Israel, which took over full local ownership of the brand in 2022.
However, said Ben & Jerry’s in as statement last week, “We have been working to change this, and so we have informed our licensee that we will not renew the license agreement when it expires at the end of next year.”
It added: “We’re a values-led company with a long history of advocating for human rights, and economic and social justice. We believe it is inconsistent with our values for our product to be present within an internationally recognized illegal occupation.”
Ben & Jerry’s co-founders Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield have previously spoken out against the conflict and criticized the humanitarian conditions in Gaza. Last year, the firm sued its parent company, Unilever, claiming that Unilever had attempted to silence it.
The company said it does plan to stay in Israel through a different, unspecified arrangement.
