On November 5, a Georgian-language Facebook user published a video showing a young man dressed in military uniform. In the video, he is crying and saying that he is being forced to go to war, that he does not want to die, and he asks viewers to share the video. In the description, the author writes, “The clown is forcibly taking young people to war.” Comments and shares show that Facebook users believe the person in the video to be a Ukrainian soldier.
An AI-generated video is circulating on Facebook in which a soldier appears to be asking for help. The footage shows flaws typical of content created using artificial intelligence, and its original source is a TikTok user who has previously posted multiple similar AI-generated videos.
Several technical flaws can be observed in the video, which are characteristic of AI-generated footage. First, the speaker’s face and tears look unnatural. The image appears “smooth,” and the tears on his chin and nose seem almost shiny. In addition, close observation of the glasses reveals that in certain frames they appear to merge with the skin.
Moreover, the patch on the uniform, where the soldier’s surname should be, is instead covered with illegible characters. This flaw frequently appears in AI-generated visuals.
According to the caption on the video, it was taken from the TikTok account “fantomoko.” The account is currently deactivated, but Myth Detector has previously fact-checked a similar video posted by the same user. In that AI-generated video published by Russian- and Georgian-language accounts, a “Ukrainian soldier” claimed he was 23 years old and was being forcibly taken to war.
As of November 4, several videos of this type were available on the “fantomoko” account. Some AI-generated videos depicted “Ukrainian soldiers,” while in others the speakers’ uniforms displayed the Russian flag. The videos varied in content – some showed soldiers crying because they were being sent to war, while one of the videos showed a person standing near the Kremlin holding a Ukrainian flag.
The videos published by “fantomoko” were also examined by Open, an Italian fact-checking platform, which traced the individual whose footage the account was using to create AI-generated videos. As the fact-checker discovered, one of the people shown in the videos is not a Ukrainian soldier but a Russian blogger – kussia88. He publishes videos on YouTube under the name КАША СТРИМ.
By comparing the faces, we can see that the face used in the AI-generated video indeed belongs to КАША СТРИМ.
Nikoloz Kordzadze
MYTH DETECTOR LAB
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