Did Kash Patel use AI to fool the Beastie Boys? : NPR

An FBI promotional video posted by director Kash Patel appears to use AI to generate a short clip that is almost identical to the Beastie Boys’ iconic music video for their 1994 classic “Sabotage.”

Patel shared the video with X on Monday in a post about the FBI’s efforts to combat “massive fraud.” The approximately two-minute video featured an instrumental version of the song “Sabotage” and nearly identical footage from the original music video, interspersed with what appeared to be real footage of FBI agents on duty.

As of Tuesday, it had been viewed about 500,000 times.

At least six clips in the FBI video were frame-by-frame recreations of shots from the iconic “Sabotage” music video directed by Spike Jonze, according to an NPR analysis. The clip featured vehicles, people, and buildings that looked incredibly similar to the original video, but with small differences that appeared to be generated by AI.

For example, in the shot of the car spinning, the grille is clearly visible on some of the windows in the original footage, but the grille is not visible in the FBI version of the clip. In another shot, a figure with a megaphone jumps from rooftop to rooftop with telephone lines in the background. All the lines and dirt on the building are in the same position as in the 1994 video, which was taken over 30 years ago. In one frame, one of the telephone wires appears to be passing through the character’s head. This is a type of flaw commonly seen in AI video generation.

Representatives for Spike Jonze and the Beastie Boys did not respond to NPR’s requests for comment. The FBI also did not respond to NPR’s request for more information about the video and how it was created.

An independent expert who reviewed the video for NPR agreed that the clip was likely generated by AI.

“It seems very likely that it’s AI,” Corinna Koltai, a researcher at the online research group Bellingcat, told NPR in an email. “You can also see some of the AI ​​errors.”

For example, Koltai says there’s a distinctive AI-generated artifact moment in the opening shot of the FBI car’s “no tampering” license plate.

Hany Farid, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley who specializes in analyzing digital images, wrote in an email that the clips were likely created by taking screenshots or short clips from the original “Sabotage” music video and inputting them into an image transformation model. It’s also possible that the AI ​​model itself generated the video clip, as the original music video was included in the training data, but Farid thinks this is unlikely.

In any case, Farid believes AI is involved, writing that it’s “hard to explain the similarities any other way.”

In President Trump’s second term, members of his administration have eagerly embraced popular music, movies, and memes as a way to spread their message, even if artists have protested.

The use of AI is also a common strategy. Notably, last October, President Trump himself posted an AI-generated video of protesters being doused with brown liquid at a “No Kings” rally set to the Kenny Loggins song “Danger Zone.” Mr. Loggins requested that the video be removed. It remains posted on Trump’s Truth social account.

In January, the White House posted an AI-manipulated image of a Minneapolis protester arrested by federal authorities without labeling the image as manipulated.

Born on Long Island in 1980, Patel would have been in middle school or high school when the Beastie Boys released “Sabotage.”