Viral Images Claiming To Show ‘Siri Dalada Vandanawa’ Are AI-Generated

Claim: A couple of images showing local residents helping devotees at the ‘Siri Dalada Vandanawa’ and garbage dumped on the premises.

Fact: The images are AI-generated.

The ‘Siri Dalada Vandanawa’, a special opportunity arranged for both local and foreign devotees to witness the revered Sacred Tooth Relic of Lord Buddha enshrined at the Sri Dalada Maligawa in Kandy, commenced on April 18 and will continue until April 27. This year’s event marks the first such viewing after 2009, with the town being overwhelmed with more than 1,00,000 devotees every day. Against this backdrop, two images are going viral on social media, claiming to be from this year’s ‘Siri Dalada Vandanawa.

The first image was shared along with a caption in Sinhala that read, “The stories we are hearing from Kandy: It’s 5.20 pm. We are still in Mahaiyawa in the queue. Then it started raining. People waiting to worship the tooth relic kept their bags on their heads—the same bags where they had the mats they would use when worshipping the tooth relic. There was lots of traffic. Then, the bus no. 622 came—that’s the number I remember seeing. People on the bus started throwing umbrellas at us. It made me cry.”

These posts were widely shared on Facebook, X and Instagram. Posts can be seen here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here.

The second image purportedly showed people praying amid the garbage strewn on the Sri Dalada Maligawa premises, along with captions reading, “How badly people are polluting this environment” and “How people are struggling with these weather conditions”. These posts can be seen here, here, here, here, here and here.

Fact Check / Verification

To confirm the authenticity of these incidents, we conducted a keyword search and found news reports stating that the streets around the temple in Kandy town have been littered with garbage, including polythene bags, plastic bottles, and food wrappers scattered along the roads. However, these reports have not mentioned any garbage found on the Sri Dalada Maligawa premises. News reports can be found here and here. 

Upon closer inspection, we identified several unnatural elements in these pictures, such as repeated patterns in the crowd, similar movements among individuals, and unusually soft features. These irregularities raised doubts about the authenticity of the images.

We checked these images using a couple of AI-image detectors, Hive Moderation and WasItAI, which yielded the following results:

Image 01

Image 02

Hence, Hive Moderation and WasItAI confirmed that the viral images were AI-generated.

Conclusion

Viral images claiming to be from the 2025 Siri Dalada Vandanawa’ are not real; both images were found to be AI-generated.

Result: Altered Photo/Video

Our Sources
HIVE Moderation: AI Image Detector
Wasitai: AI Image Detector

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