Claim: A video shows a Pakistan Army soldier grabbing a man and yelling at him for spreading terrorism in Pakistan with the help of India.
Fact: The clip is AI-generated.
On 5 December, a Facebook user posted a video (archive) apparently showing a Pakistan Army soldier grabbing a man, and shouting [translated from Urdu to English]: “Are you not ashamed of yourselves? We gave shelter to you people in our country, and in return, you gave us terrorism. You are spreading terrorism in our country in collaboration with India, which is our enemy country. You people are not even ashamed.”
The man being held says, “Whatever we did…” before the clip ends abruptly .
“#army #PakistanZindabad”, reads the text alongside the clip.
Fact or Fiction?
Soch Fact Check conducted an analysis and found that the clip is AI-generated.
The Urdu text on the soldier’s uniform (his chest) is barely legible and appears distorted, a tell-tale sign of AI . While we can read “khan” on the tag on the left, the text on the tag on the right appears to be erased.
Red shows illegible Urdu text. Green shows a tag with missing/erased text.
A closer look at the face of another soldier, standing beside a car in the background, revealed that it was distorting continuously, another hallmark of AI.
Face of the soldier in the background that keeps distorting and morphing.
Moreover, the facial hair of the two men appears airbrushed, indicating AI’s usage.
Soch Fact Check then analysed the video by running the clip through multiple AI detection tools. One such tool is Hive Moderation. This yielded a total probability of 99.9%, indicating that “overall, the video is likely to contain AI-generated or deepfake content”.
Results from Hive Moderation.
Deepfake-O-Meter, an initiative of the University at Buffalo, offers various algorithms to detect AI-generated media. In this case, four algorithms yielded percentages above 50% — 100.0%, 85.5%, 71.4%, and 60.6% — indicating a high probability of the clip being fake. Two more algorithms also yielded scores of 48.3% and 46.3%. (Remaining algorithms did not give results, stating either no lip movement was detected or that “the detector requires a visible face, but face detection failed on this input.”)
Results from Deepfake-O-Meter
We also ran the footage through Zhuque AI Detection Assistant, which returned a score of 41.85%, indicating uncertainty about whether the clip was AI-generated.
However, Soch Fact Check’s analysis of the clip, along with the fact that two of the three AI detection tools yielded high scores, confirms that it is fake.
Furthermore, examining this user’s profile shows that he has posted multiple videos that appear to have been created with artificial intelligence. In fact, Soch Fact Check has debunked this user here and here previously.
Virality
This Facebook video was viewed 543,000 times and received 8,000 reactions.
Conclusion: The clip is AI-generated.
Background image in cover photo: Express Tribune
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