Liberals Wrongly Claim Large Crowd at Military Parade Was AI
By Nicole Dirks
What happened: Shortly after the Department of Defense shared an image showing a large crowd at the June 14, 2025, military parade in Washington, left-leaning social media users began falsely accusing the government of using artificial intelligence to boost the appearance of the crowd size.
Context: On June 14, 2025, President Donald Trump hosted a parade along Washington’s National Mall to mark the U.S. Army’s 250th anniversary, which coincided with his 79th birthday.
Trump has long been focused on crowd sizes, once falsely accusing the media of downplaying attendance at his 2017 inauguration.
A closer look: On June 15, 2025, an X account for the Pentagon posted a photo of a densely packed crowd at the parade surrounding the Washington Monument and stated, “We were honored to host HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of proud Americans at the Army’s 250th anniversary.”
Anti-Trump accounts soon claimed that the image was manipulated, possibly with AI, to make the crowd look bigger than it actually was.
Anti-Trump X user @WUTangKids posted a screenshot of the image and stated, “LMAO been waiting for them [to] post a photoshopped pic of Dear Leader’s parade crowd size and they didn’t disappoint with this gem.” The post received 2.7 million views and 45,000 likes in one day.
Liberal X user @allenanalysis stated, “BUSTED: The Pentagon just tried to gaslight America with a fake crowd photo from Trump’s military parade.” The post garnered 5 million views and 55,000 likes in one day.
Actually: The image is not AI, according to AI detection software.
NewsGuard ran the photo through AI detection tools Hive and Decopy AI, which determined there was only a 1.5 percent and 2.2 percent chance, respectively, that the image was AI-generated.
NewsGuard reviewed seven other images of the crowd surrounding the Washington Monument on June 14, captured from different angles, and found they depicted similar crowd sizes to the one shared by the Pentagon.
After the accusations about the photo surfaced, the Pentagon issued a statement on X saying, “We don’t use AI to enhance crowd size.” The Associated Press reported that as many as 200,000 people were anticipated to attend the parade, but poor weather conditions resulted in a crowd that “appeared to fall far short of early predictions.”
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