From AFP Fact Check
Video of Biden botching Ukraine history is a deepfake
By Bill McCarthy
A video spreading across X appears to show Joe Biden erroneously saying Russia has occupied Kyiv for 10 years, confusing the Ukrainian capital with the annexed peninsula of Crimea. But the clip is a deepfake combining fabricated audio with unrelated footage; AFP found no record of the US president making such remarks.
“The Joe Biden promised to help Ukraine free Kiev from the Russian occupation that has been going on for the last 10 years,” says a March 19, 2024 post from an X account called “S p r i n t e r F a c t o r y,” which frequently shares disinformation about the president, the war in Ukraine and other topics...
“I am confident that this is a fake video,” said Hany Farid, a professor at the University of California-Berkeley and an expert in digital forensics (archived here).
Farid analyzed the video and told AFP a model trained to distinguish real speech from that created by artificial intelligence “confidently classifies the audio as AI-generated.” A separate model trained to detect inconsistencies between the movements of a speaker’s mouth and their words also “confidently classifies the video as fake...”
Hany Farid is a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Sciences and the School of Information at UC Berkeley.
