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By John Leicester
October 25, 2025 — 12.37pm
Paris: It was shortly after the stunning heist of the crown jewels at the Louvre when photographer Thibault Camus caught in his frame a dapperly dressed young man walking by uniformed French police officers, their car blocking one of the museum gates.
Instinctively, he took the shot.
Thibault Camus photographed the dapper man shortly after the Louvre jewel heist. The image whipped up online speculation as to the man’s identity – and even his existence.Credit: AP
It wasn’t a particularly great photo, with someone’s shoulder obscuring part of the foreground, the Paris-based AP photographer told himself.
But it did the job – showing French police sealing off the world’s most-visited museum after the brazen daylight robbery last Sunday.
Plus, Camus figured, the man walking past the officers was so well-dressed – a trench coat draped like a cloak, a jacket, a buttoned-up vest, an electric-blue tie, a fedora tilted just so – adding a touch of Paris couture to the scene.
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And so off went the photo to worldwide audiences. From there, fertile imaginations sprung into high gear – whipping up an online buzz.
It also triggered debate about whether the sharp-dressed man was even real, or an image generated with artificial intelligence.
Posts on social media declared him to be a French detective – if you will, a more dashing version of the famed Inspector Clouseau from the Pink Panther movies – even though the photograph caption had not identified him.
It simply read: “Police officers block an access to the Louvre museum after a robbery Sunday, Oct. 19, 2025, in Paris.”
A post on X that now has 5.6 million views says: “Actual shot (not AI!) of a French detective working the case of the French Crown Jewels that were stolen from the Louvre.”
“Never gonna crack it with a detective who wears an actual fedora unironically,” wrote Melissa Chen, a tech executive based in London, in a post on the social platform X that has been viewed more than 5 million times, The New York Times reported.
“To solve it, we need an unshaven, overweight, washed-out detective who’s in the middle of divorce. A functioning alcoholic who the rest of the department hates.”
Another poster – with 1.2 million followers – claimed that the man “who looks like he came out of a detective film noir from the 1940s is an actual French police detective who’s investigating the theft”.
Some on social media urged Netflix to secure the rights to the man’s story, while others said he was simply being French.
On the speculation that the man was an AI creation, Matt Groh, an assistant professor at Northwestern University whose research focuses on AI-generated images, told The New York Times that it felt plausible because there is something about the image that “seems off”. He looks “too good” to be real.
The photographer, however, confirmed that he was real. “He appeared in front of me, I saw him, I took the photo,” he said. “He passed by and left.”
Camus also said nothing suggested the man was investigating the brazen crime. He was just someone who streamed away from the Louvre as authorities evacuated the area.
“I don’t know him,” he told The New York Times. “I don’t know if he is French. Maybe a tourist? Maybe he is English.”
If the unidentified man really is one of the more than 100 investigators hunting for the jewel thieves, the authorities are keeping it very hush-hush.
“We’d rather keep the mystery alive ;)” the Paris prosecutor’s office said with a wink in an email response to questions.
AP
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