Popular ice cream brand Ben & Jerry’s has been in the news lately more for its political activism than for its inventive treats.
Co-founder Ben Cohen was arrested during a mid-May U.S. Senate hearing for protesting humanitarian conditions in Gaza. And the company’s independent board on May 29 called Israel-Hamas war a “genocide in Gaza.”
But images that appear to show newly-named ice cream flavors referencing the political conflict are not real.
“Shame on Ben & Jerry’s,” said a May 26 X post that showed a picture of a Ben & Jerry’s carton that read “Free Palestine” underneath two animated characters wearing keffiyeh headdresses popularly worn in Arab cultures.
(Screenshot of X post.)
Sign up for PolitiFact texts
Other posts on Facebook, X and TikTok also shared images of what looked like cartons promoting a flavor called “From the River to Sea.” The phrase references the slogan, “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” which dates back to the early 1960s and holds different meaning for two sides in the conflict: For many Palestinians, it signals hope for an independent Palestinian state, while many supporters of Israel view it as a violent antisemitic rallying cry.
Ben & Jerry’s official website lists no such flavors. The images originated on an Instagram account that disclosed they were made using Chat GPT, an artificial intelligence tool.
“I JUST HAD CHATGPT MAKE THIS BECAUSE I THOUGHT IT’D LOOK SWEET,” a caption on @iampocoloco’s May 15 post read.
We also ran the image through programs that identify whether images were generated with artificial intelligence. Although these are not infallible, one of them, Hive Moderation, showed that one of the ice cream images had a 98.2% probability of being AI-generated. Another tool, WasItAI, reported it was created with AI as well.
Ben & Jerry’s has long been embroiled in a legal dispute involving its political activism. In 2024, it sued its parent company, Unilever, over alleged attempts to silence Ben & Jerry’s position on Gaza. The controversy between the companies started in 2021, when Ben & Jerry’s said it would stop selling ice cream in the Israel-occupied West Bank.
Ben & Jerry’s has been advocating for human rights, economic and social justice since Cohen and Jerry Greenfield co-founded the brand in 1978.
We rate the claim that Ben & Jerry’s created “Free Palestine” and “From the River to Sea” ice cream flavors False.
