An 11-minute-long voice-cloned audio of British broadcaster Piers Morgan praising India’s strength against the West is falsely viral on social media as an authentic speech by him.
BOOM shared the audio with media forensics expert Prof. Siwei Lyu from the University at Buffalo, who confirmed to BOOM that the clip showed clear signs of being generated using a text-to-speech or voice cloning algorithm, including unnatural cuts, clipped words, and the absence of natural breathing sounds.
This viral clip is part of a broader wave of AI-manipulated content featuring Western public figures allegedly making pro-India or anti-West remarks.
The Claim
The audio clip, widely shared on X (archived here) and Facebook, purportedly features Piers Morgan saying:
- “The West cannot defeat India militarily, culturally, ideologically, or economically.”
- India is a “continuous civilisation” that survived colonial “divide and rule, famine, cultural erasure, conversion campaigns” without losing its “soul.”
- India had advanced learning during Europe’s “dark ages.”
Users sharing the clip claimed Morgan delivered the speech as part of his journalistic commentary (archived here).
What We Found
BOOM found that the viral clip is not authentic, but rather AI-generated and manipulated.
- No record of Morgan making such remarks: Keyword searches across Google, Yahoo, and Yandex did not return any credible interviews, broadcasts, editorials, or verified social media posts from Piers Morgan where he made these statements.
- AI-generated artifacts confirmed by expert: BOOM consulted Prof. Siwei Lyu, a media forensics expert and computer scientist at the University at Buffalo. Lyu’s team conducted a detailed manual analysis and concluded the audio was AI-generated using text-to-speech or voice cloning algorithms. They identified several artifacts:
- At 0:35: unnatural cut sounds.
- At 1:52 and 3:33: clipped words, unusual phrasing, ambiguous pauses, and “electric” human-like sounds.
- Nearly no breathing sounds across the 11-minute clip.
- The pace of delivery lacked natural variation, another marker of synthetic audio
- Reverse search confirms synthetic origins: A Google reverse image search led BOOM to a longer version of the same video on YouTube, uploaded by a channel called “Pathway to Light.” The description explicitly labels the content as “altered or synthetic.” A closer look at the YouTube channel revealed that it exclusively posts voice cloned commentaries on India using Morgan's voice.