Is a photo that shows Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer smiling and dining with Jeffrey Epstein legitimate? No, that's not true: The image was created by an artificial intelligence tool, according to several AI-generated content detectors. Google's Gemini detected a SynthID watermark embedded in the image indicating that all or part of it was created or edited with Google AI. There are no public records of the image of Schumer and Epstein dining together.
The image appeared in a February 3, 2026, post on the X account @BuzzPatterson (archived here). It opened with the caption:
Hey Chuckles, what's up?
(Image source: Lead Stories screenshot of X.com/BuzzPatterson.)
Lead Stories uploaded the image to the Hive Moderation AI-generated content detection tool for analysis. Hive scored it 100% likely to be AI-generated content. It specified that Google's Gemini3 was likely the AI model which made the image, as this screenshot shows:
(Image source: Lead Stories screenshot of Hive moderation website.)
Additionally, Lead Stories uploaded the image to Google's Gemini (conversation archived here) which used the watermarking tool SynthID (archived here) ("A tool to watermark and identify content generated through AI") to determine the image was edited or generated with Google's own AI tools:
(Image Source: Lead Stories screenshot from google.com.)
Lead Stories searched the Department of Justice's library of Epstein files (archived here) and manually reviewed the 54 mentions of Schumer in files available as of Feb. 6, 2026, finding no photo of the senator with the pedophile.
Senator Schumer and Epstein having dinner together would have been major news. A Google Lens search only returned the same AI-generated image posted on social media accounts. A Google News search using relevant keywords did not find any news reports of the two dining together.
