Fake, AI-generated images and videos of the Iran war are spreading on social media

Source Domain: www.cnn.com

After Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, social media was littered with crude fakes that were presented as fresh images of the war but were either photoshopped phonies or mislabeled clips taken from video games, movies, past incidents and unrelated news coverage.

Those kinds of old-fashioned fakes are now spreading again during the war against Iran. This time, they have been joined by a form of deception that wasn’t readily available in 2022: high-quality videos and still images that have been custom-created with easy-to-use artificial intelligence tools.

Ten years ago, said Hany Farid, a University of California, Berkeley, professor specializing in digital forensics, “there’d be like one or two fake things out there; they’d get debunked pretty fast. … Now you see hundreds of them, and they’re really realistic.” Farid added: “It’s not just realistic, it’s landing — it’s landing hard. People believe it and they’re amplifying it.”

“What has changed in the last year or so is that generative AI has become much more widely accessible,” said BBC Verify senior journalist Shayan Sardarizadeh, a prominent debunker of war-related fakes, “and it’s now possible to create very believable videos and images appearing to show a significant war incident that is hard to detect to the untrained or naked eye.”

Fake videos and images that experts like Sardarizadeh have identified as AI-created have racked up tens of millions of views on social media platforms in the nearly two weeks since the Iran war began.

One fake video shows a fictional barrage of Iranian missiles supposedly striking Tel Aviv, Israel. A second fake video depicts panicked people fleeing a supposed Iranian attack on an airport in Tel Aviv. A third fake video purports to show captured US…

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