An artificial intelligence (AI) generated video claiming to show an Indian youth from Haryana fighting for the Russian Army and desperately pleading for help from the Indian government, is circulating online as a real video.
The 15 second clip shows the youth speaking in Hindi and appealing to people to circulate the video as widely as possible so that it reaches the government. The young man in the video claims ten of his companions have already died, making him the lone survivor.
BOOM found the footage does not contain real visuals. Multiple AI detector tests confirmed that the video was created using artificial intelligence.
The Claim
The video was posted by the X handle @Baba_Thoka with the following caption: "Studying in India has become so expensive that Haryana’s youth rushed to Russia for his future; only to be thrown into a warzone after 10 days of ‘training’. Now, some families have received partial bodies, some sons are missing, and one survivor is begging New Delhi for help."
Click here to view an archive of the post.
The same synthetic video is circulating with a similar caption in Hindi. Click here to view the post and here for an archive.
What We Found: Viral Video Is AI Generated
AI Detector Tools Flag Manipulation: We first tried to trace the video but found no credible source confirming it to be a real appeal from an Indian youth in the Russian warzone. Taking a cue, we tested the video on the AI detector tool Hive Moderation which concluded with 99 per cent confidence that the footage is likely AI generated or deepfake content.
Furthermore, we tested the video on another AI video detector tool, Deepfake o Meter, developed by the University of Buffalo. We used multiple parameters on the tool to examine the video, and several of them indicated with high confidence that it is AI generated and contains fake visuals.
A test using the AI voice detector tool Hiya also concluded that the voice in the video has a high probability of being a deepfake.
