Fake AI-generated movies and pictures about Venezuela obtain tens of millions of views | EUROtoday

AI-generated photographs and movies following the arrest of Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro have flooded social media, receiving tens of millions of views as consultants warn that visible cues are now not a dependable inform for synthetic intelligence.

Within hours of Donald Trump’s announcement that Maduro had been captured, AI-generated photographs of the arrest and outdated footage claiming to point out the navy operation in Caracas had been broadly shared on social media.

Elon Musk re-posted an AI-generated footage of Venezuelans crying on their knees, thanking Trump and the US for releasing them from Nicolas Maduro. The footage, initially revealed by an account on X known as Wall Street Apes, has been seen 5.7 million occasions on the platform.

Research by Shayan Sardarizadeh, a senior journalist for BBC Verify, revealed that the video was initially posted on TikTok by an account known as Curious Mind, which usually shares AI-generated movies. A group observe beneath the reposted video described it as “AI generated and is currently being presented as a factual statement intended to mislead people.”

Multiple errors may be noticed within the video, from incorrect flag patterns and disappearing objects, to lacking enamel. The video has since been taken down on TikTok however stays on X.

Musk has gone on to share a number of “AI slop” movies, together with one deepfake of Maduro breakdancing with president Trump, and one other of the Venezuelan president in jail with Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs.

While he has not responded to claims on social media that the video of the Venezuelans crying was false, he has since reposted content material that vouches for X’s accuracy.

Vince Lago, mayor of Coral Gables, Florida, was certainly one of many who reposted a hyper-realistic, AI-generated picture of Maduro being led off a aircraft by US legislation enforcement brokers on Instagram.

Analysis by Google’s SynthID detection software revealed an invisible watermark on the content material that proves it was generated or edited utilizing AI software program. According to Google Gemini, this watermark is “imperceptible to the human eye but can be detected by software”.

As a part of his submit utilizing the faux picture on social media, the politician declared: “With the capture of Nicolas Maduro earlier today, America is safer and Venezuela is one step closer to freedom.

“President Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio were clear from the start: Maduro is not President of Venezuela, he is the leader of a narco-terrorist organization threatening our country. God bless our men and women in uniform, and may God continue to bless our great country.”

The creator of the now-viral, AI-generated picture of Maduro later got here ahead as a Spanish-based X consumer with lower than 100 followers. A self-described ‘AI video art enthusiast’, who goes by Ian Weber, advised AFP that he had by no means anticipated it to grow to be so broadly shared.

He created the faux with Google Gemini’s Nano Banana Pro to submit inside 20 minutes of Trump’s announcement of the operation on Truth Social, in line with AFP.

Another AI-generated picture confirmed a soldier posing subsequent to Maduro, who has a black hood over his head, in line with a report from NewsGuard outlining fabricated and out-of-context pictures and movies linked to the navy operation in Venezuela.

NewsGuard, which gives providers resembling misinformation monitoring, mentioned that seven of the deceptive pictures and movies it recognized have now garnered greater than 14 million views on X alone.

Benjamin Dubow, a democratic resilience fellow on the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA), defined to The Independent that the AI generated content material took place as social media customers tried to fill an data void within the hours after Maduro’s seize was introduced.

“With the capture of Maduro, you have one of the biggest, most shocking news stories of the past couple of years and especially Saturday morning US time, the couple of hours after the event happened, there’s almost no news coming out because there’s just a lot of uncertainty.

“You have the press conference at 11 o’clock Eastern Time, but you have news already broken before then about the event and you have a lot of demand for an understanding of what’s been going on and what’s happening.

“There were a lot of people on social media generally who were more than happy to step in to fill that void,” he added. “What’s kind of interesting about what Musk shared, what the Mayor of Coral Gable shared… They were fakes, but they weren’t really conveying anything that different than what happened.”

He added that fundamental media literacy remained essential within the face of the sheer quantity of content material and misinformation on-line.

“Best practice is waiting until there are actual reliable sources, validating the sources, making sure they’re credible, reliable and up to date,” he mentioned. “Basic media literacy as it existed 20 years ago still applies now. It’s a much bigger challenge because the volume of content is hundreds or thousands of times greater than it was back then.

“The really big thing is you should be the most suspicious of content that you most agree with, which is very hard and counterintuitive to do, but the stuff you agree with, the stuff that makes the most sense, that’s the easiest way to trick you into believing something that’s not true,” he added.

“You’re by no means gonna imagine one thing that makes the opposite facet look good, so the opposite facet’s misinformation actually is not gonna have an effect on you.”

Sofia Rubinson, senior editor of NewsGuard’s Reality Check, told The Independent: “As AI-generated images and videos improve to the point where visual cues are no longer reliable, it’s more important than ever to approach content on social platforms with skepticism, even when shared by prominent or verified accounts.

“In situations like Venezuela, where credible news organisations may lack immediate access or visuals, AI-generated content and manipulated media can quickly fill the information void. These images may not always invent events outright, but they can misrepresent context, timing, or scale. Our ability to trust what we see on social media is rapidly declining.”

As well as AI generated media, old footage of previous incidents in Venezuela have been recycled, causing further confusion. Even president Trump has shared footage purporting to show throngs of Venezuelans “celebrating” the US military’s recent capture of president Maduro.

The post on Truth Social showed a massive crowd of people gathered in Caracas. Its caption states: “Millions of Venezuelans are celebrating the news of the collapse of the Maduro regime.”

A reverse image search of the clip showed the footage was actually from a protest in Caracas after Maduro’s disputed presidential win in July 2024.

The same video has been reposted by right wing influencer and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones on X, who alleged to his audience of 4.4 million followers it was to celebrate “the ouster of Communist dictator Nicolas Maduro”. It has been viewed 2.2 million times.

The Independent has contacted X and Meta for comment.