On October 10, Facebook user Gogaggg published a video collage showing clashes between police and demonstrators. In several clips police officers are seen spraying pepper spray into protesters’ eyes. The post’s caption reads, “This is how police act against radical liberals.”
The circulated video collage contains footage generated by artificial intelligence. The scenes showing police officers spraying pepper spray into protesters’ faces were created using Sora, a program developed by OpenAI.
The video collage shared on Facebook combines 13 different clips. Three of them depict protesters shouting at police officers, who respond by spraying pepper spray on the protesters’ faces.
All three clips are AI-generated. Upon closer inspection, one of them bears the watermark of OpenAI’s Sora model. The model generates short videos based on user-provided texts or photos. On September 30, the company released Sora 2, which allows the creation of even more realistic videos.
The videos began circulating on social media in early October. Their authenticity was also examined by the U.S. fact-checking organization Lead Stories. According to its articles (1; 2) published on October 8 and 9, all three videos were AI-generated. They also contain flaws characteristic of AI-generated content – for example, the movement of speakers’ mouths does not precisely match the audio.
The remaining footage in the collage is genuine. Almost all the clips were filmed during protests against the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency in various U.S. cities. Some of them (1; 2; 3; 4) were recorded outside ICE facilities in Portland and Chicago. One video shows a man being approached from behind by police officers and forced to the ground, The man is Daryn Herzberg, who subsequently filed a lawsuit against the Department of Homeland security (1; 2).
One of the other videos is not related to the ICE protests but shows a demonstration held in Los Angeles in June 2020, calling for justice in the George Floyd case.
Accordingly, the video collage circulated amid ongoing protest rallies in Georgia combined authentic and AI-generated footage. Its purpose is to create the impression that the use of force against protesters is normalized in the United States.
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