Is there really a young Shahrukh Khan doppelganger in Kashmir?
For a few days now, an image of a Shah Rukh Khan lookalike has gone viral on social media with the claim that this is a boy from Kashmir resembling the Bollywood superstar.
Several Facebook users have posted the picture with the caption, “Kashmiri boy is making rounds on Social media who looks Like as Bollywood Badshah Shah Rukh Khan”.
Some websites have also published the image with the same claim.
However, this is not an image of a Kashmiri boy who looks like Shah Rukh Khan. The viral image is an edited version of SRK’s photograph created through FaceApp, a mobile application for photo editing using artificial intelligence.
The archived versions of the posts are saved here, here, and here.
Several people raised suspicions on the claim and insisted the picture was edited using FaceApp. Taking this as a cue, we used FaceApp to alter an image of SRK available on the Internet.
A “teenage” filter on the SRK image and found it is similar to the viral image.
Since none of the users or websites making the claim could provide details about any Kashmiri boy who looks like Shah Rukh Khan, and with FaceApp giving us a similar result as the viral image, it can be concluded that the picture in circulation is not of a doppelganger of the Bollywood actor, but rather his edited photograph.