French President Emmanuel Macron discovered the news of his alleged downfall after receiving a concerned message with a link to a Facebook video.
“on sunday [14 December] One of my African counterparts wrote to me and said, “Dear Mr. President, what is going on with you?” I am very worried,” President Macron told readers of local French newspaper La Provence on December 16.
Alongside the message is a compelling video showing a woman who looks exactly like the newscaster delivering her message to the camera, with circling helicopters, military personnel and a gathering crowd.
“Unofficial reports suggest that a coup led by an unidentified colonel could oust President Emmanuel Macron in France. However, authorities have not issued a clear statement,” she says.
However, this video is not real. It's actually created by AI.
After discovering the video, Macron asked Pharos (France's official portal for informing about illegal content online) to call Facebook's parent company Meta to remove the fake video.
However, the request was rejected as the platform claimed that it did not violate its “Terms of Service.”
The French President then decided to take it upon himself to ensure its removal.
“I tend to think that I have more power to apply pressure than others,” Macron said. “I mean, it would be easier to say something serious if I called you, but that's not going to happen.”
“These people are making fun of us,” he added. “They are putting us at risk because they don’t care about quiet public debate and they don’t care about democracy.”
So who is behind these fake videos?
The original video, which quickly racked up more than 12 million views, was originally posted by a Facebook account named “Islam” and, despite its name, does not post any religious content.
The teenager who runs the account is based in Burkina Faso and earns money by running courses that focus on how to monetize AI.
He ultimately deleted the video over a week after it was first published due to political and social controversy.
Euronews' fact-checking team The Cube has made numerous attempts to contact him via the number listed on his Facebook account, but calls have so far gone unanswered.
In some videos, an AI-generated news anchor is seen holding a microphone with the logo of Radio France International (RFI), the international arm of French public radio.
Some videos have a “Sora” watermark, suggesting that much of this content was likely created using this technology.
Sora 2, a technology developed by OpenAI, the company that founded Chat GPT, allows users to generate 10-second hyper-realistic videos from text prompts.
Other videos will not display this logo, but you can remove it during post-production.
The technology has been controversial since it was announced in October, leading to the proliferation of highly sophisticated and hard-to-identify AI videos on social media.
