Fact Check: Is the deceased grandma encased in resin picture real? Viral social media post debunked

An image showing a grandma encased in resin has gone viral on Twitter, leaving netizens quite flabbergasted. In the picture, three other people were standing behind a table smiling, and on the table was a transparent and hardened large box encapsulating an old lady, whose face inside the resin seemed tilted to one side in distortion.

The image was uploaded by Chris Ray Gun on June 20. He wrote in the caption that the family encased their deceased grandmother in resin and was using her as a coffee table.

The tweet quickly went viral and raked over 450K views. The image was reposted by several accounts on social media platforms.

While people were indeed quite shocked at first to see the bizarre image, they soon realized that it was fake. Commenters online mentioned that all signs in the image pointed to it having been manipulated by either Photoshop or artificial intelligence technology.

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Internet reacts to the viral image of grandma encased in resin

Although everyone knew the image was fake, they engaged in sharing some light-hearted jokes about it and came up with hilarious reactions to the viral picture. Some people came up with their own versions of how they wanted to be preserved by their families after their deaths, and it kept getting funnier.

One person noted that things inside resin can still rot, so if the image was real, the family would have to witness their grandma slowly turn into the "cryptkeeper."

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The saga of AI-generated resin-encased images continues

A little digging into the internet led us to a tweet by Kelly Port, a visual effects supervisor who is also credited on IMDB for working in the Marvel franchise's Spider-Man: No Way Home as well as a few other big-budget films.

It turned out that Kelly tweeted a similar image on June 18. However, Kelly's tweet showed the resin box containing a dog instead of an old woman. He captioned it as encasing loved ones in acrylic resin and implied that it is a Father's Day gift.

In the image, the large face of a dog smiling with its eyes wide open is seen inside the resin. It also appeared unrealistic as the head of the dog was too big. Though Kelly did not provide any clarification about the image being doctored, people guessed it and went along with the joke.

It appeared that another account, Free Willie Urqs originally created the image with the grandmother encased in resin. The account replied to Kelly Port's tweet with the viral "grandma in resin" image on June 19. Kelly Port also replied to Free Willie's tweet and wrote that the grandmother would make for a great coffee table.

The replies to Free Willie's tweet kept getting more hilarious as one user, SJ Melnick, sarcastically wrote that he loved how the grandmother's right hand was prominently displaying six fingers.

To this, Free Willie responded by altering the image a bit more where the grandma's right hand was seen covered with the face of a small puppy while her left hand appeared to be almost coming out of the resin with four prominent fingers on it.

One user gave wicked ideas to the creators and asked them to drop the resin box in a swimming pool to see how people would react.

A little later in the replies under Free Willie's comment, a reporter, Jordan Liles wrote that he was looking into these virally shared images and asked the creators if they could provide a detailing on the specific tools and process they used to manipulate the image.

Free Willie responded to Jordan and wrote that they cannot speak for what tools Kelly Port used for the resin-encases dog picture. But for their part, they edited the picture in the new Photoshop Beta using the AI generation tool. Free Willie also shared a screenshot of how they searched on Photoshop specifically for an image of a grandma encased in ice.

It can be presumed that Chris Ray Gun took the image from this account and shared it in his tweet separately. Although Free Willie's last tweet showed that they originally meant for the preservation material to be ice and not resin, the image went viral as resin-encased grandma.