Video of crying Ukrainian soldier turned out to be an AI fakePublished at 11:59 GMT
thomas copland
BBC Verify Live Journalist
A viral video showing a crying young Ukrainian soldier being sent to the front lines appears to be AI-generated disinformation.
In the video, the man can be seen tearfully saying, “I just turned 23, but I don’t want to die.”
A reverse image search suggested it came from a now-deleted TikTok account that shared an AI-generated video purporting to show a Ukrainian soldier crying.
In some videos on this account, the watermark of Sora, a text-to-video AI model created by OpenAI, is clearly visible. But this video doesn’t have that.
This video consists of two short clips, one 4 seconds and one 10 seconds, edited together. Most models can only generate continuous shots of up to 10 seconds, so the shortness of the clip is an indicator of AI generation.
Another indicator of pro-Russian disinformation is his estimated age, since conscription in Ukraine only applies to men between the ages of 25 and 60 who are eligible for military service.
The deepfake was widely disseminated by anti-Ukrainian social media accounts, with one post garnering nearly 2 million views on X.
Some of the post’s captions are directed at Ukraine’s allies, urging them to stop supporting them.
The account that originally posted it has now been removed from TikTok, and we have asked the platform why it was removed.
