ISLAMABAD: Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi received a new presidential distinction from Seychelles on Sunday, but the image of the certificate that circulated publicly drew more scrutiny than the honor itself after journalists and fact-checkers identified spelling errors, an AI watermark, and a four-day gap between the award's creation and its presentation.
The "Guardian of the Blue Horizon" was authorized by the Seychelles Cabinet on June 24, just 96 hours before the ceremony, according to former Rajya Sabha member Saket Gokhale, who posted the cabinet decision on X.
Indian Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri confirmed the award at an MEA press briefing in Victoria on June 28. Even Seychelles President Patrick Herminie himself announced the award for Modi at a press conference, according to a video published by Press Trust India.
Indian state media was quick to tout it as “the first time” the “distinction” had been “conferred” on anyone.
The certificate image distributed through BJP promotional channels then went viral for all the wrong reasons. Aroon Deep, who covers technology policy for The Hindu, reshared a post by a WION editor, Sidhant Sibal and attached an image as proof that the honor was, in his words, "Generated with OpenAI tools."
"Seychelles used ChatGPT to make a state honor for PM Modi," he wrote on X.
Mohammed Zubair, co-founder of fact-checking organization AltNews, separately catalogued the text errors on X.
"It's OPVS and not OPUS. It's Republic and not Repubblic. It's Seychelles and not Seycheeles."
The forensic basis for the AI claim centers on a SynthID watermark detected in the image. SynthID, developed by Google DeepMind and documented by IndiaAI, embeds an imperceptible identifier directly into an image's pixel structure, one that survives compression, resizing, and file conversion, according to Silicon.co.uk.
Its presence in the circulated graphic indicated that it was AI-generated. It did not, however, establish that the physical certificate presented at the State House carried the same errors.
Generative AI tools are known to treat text as a visual pattern rather than a linguistic structure, frequently producing characters that look plausible but are misspelled, as documented by UX Collective.
The legislative timeline further compressed the window.
According to ANI News, Seychelles recently overhauled its national honors framework and instituted the new Presidential Distinction category, leaving communications teams with fewer than four days between cabinet approval and the ceremony. The Wire reported the timeline using Seychelles state records.
Neither the Indian Ministry of External Affairs nor the Seychelles State House published a high-resolution scan of the certificate on their official portals. This makes any comparison between the circulated image and the physical document impossible.
Supriya Shrinate of the opposition Indian National Congress flagged the four-day turnaround on X.
The Deccan Herald reported that opposition figures drew a direct line between the award's rushed creation and India's concurrent announcement of a $175 million Special Economic Package for Seychelles, comprising a $125 million concessional line of credit and $50 million in grants.
The optics were difficult to ignore. A freshly minted award, a $175 million check, and a certificate that appears to have been generated by the same technology now available to anyone with an internet connection.
Neither government has offered an explanation, and neither has taken the certificate down.
