Video of ICE agent arresting his own mother is AI fakepublished at 11:30 GMT
11:30 GMT
Thomas Copeland
BBC Verify Live journalist
A video appearing to show a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent detaining his own mother has gathered hundreds of thousands of views across social media – but it’s been made using artificial intelligence (AI) software.
There are clear red flags that lead us to say the video is AI-generated, such as the scrambled text on an agent’s uniform and the van.
We also found the TikTok account that first posted the video with the caption “AI-generated parody – not real footage”.
Another way we can spot AI-generated videos is to look out for a watermark added by the text-to-video generator that made it.
Videos made using OpenAI’s Sora model, for example, will place a watermark for a few seconds at the top left of the screen. It then moves to the middle right, bottom left, back to the top left and then repeats the pattern.
Increasingly, however, we’re seeing attempts to hide these watermarks in order to mislead the viewer. We’ve marked out below where we can identify attempts to remove a watermark which appears on screen for a few seconds at a time in the same three places.
In the first image below, when the watermark is removed from the top left the roof in the background is blurred for a few seconds. Then in the central image, the clasp on the agent’s jacket on the right briefly disappears. And in the final image, when the watermark is removed from the bottom left, the woman’s dress temporarily appears distorted.
