Pro tip: That "live" news clip from last night wasn't real at all

I watched a video yesterday of a politician saying something wild during a press conference. Looked totally real, good lighting, perfect lip sync. But I noticed the background shadows were wrong for the time of day. Ran it through a free deepfake detector site and it came back 94% synthetic. The original footage was from 3 years ago with different audio swapped in. Has anyone else caught a fake that slipped past their radar?

3 comments

3 Comments

robert6591mo ago

Heard about this from my buddy Mike who works at a local news station. He said they got a tip about a big protest downtown and the footage looked insane with fires and people screaming. But the timestamp on the video was from last summer, and the weather in the clip didn't match what was happening outside his window that day. Someone had just repackaged old riot footage from a different city to make it look like fresh chaos.

blake7921mo ago

Yeah honestly I used to think people were just being paranoid about this stuff. I figured if it looked real enough on screen then it probably was real. But then my buddy sent me this clip of a governor shaking hands with some guy I'd never seen before, and it just felt off somehow. The handshake was too smooth, like their hands didn't even press together right. I googled the original event and found out the governor wasn't even in that state that day. The whole thing was a deepfake with a random actor's face mapped onto someone else's body. That was the moment it clicked for me. Now I don't trust anything unless I can find the raw footage from multiple sources.

samflores1mo ago

Caught one myself a few months back. Someone sent me this viral clip of a politician falling down the stairs, looked super authentic with the right lighting and crowd reactions. But I pulled up the original event stream and the fall never happened in the full video. The whole thing was stitched together from two different days, even the crowd was a different color shirts than the actual event. That's when I started double checking everything, even stuff that looks boring and real.