{"id":528837,"date":"2026-03-11T10:04:10","date_gmt":"2026-03-11T10:04:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/528837\/"},"modified":"2026-03-11T10:04:10","modified_gmt":"2026-03-11T10:04:10","slug":"fake-ai-generated-images-and-videos-of-the-iran-war-are-spreading-on-social-media","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/528837\/","title":{"rendered":"Fake, AI-generated images and videos of the Iran war are spreading on social media"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n After Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, social media was littered with crude fakes<\/a> that were presented as fresh images of the war but were either photoshopped phonies<\/a> or mislabeled clips taken from video games, movies, past incidents and unrelated news coverage.\n <\/p>\n

\n Those kinds of old-fashioned fakes are<\/a> now spreading again<\/a> during the war against Iran. This time, they have been joined by a form of deception that wasn\u2019t readily available in 2022: high-quality videos and still images that have been custom-created with easy-to-use artificial intelligence tools.\n <\/p>\n

\n Ten years ago, said Hany Farid<\/a>, a University of California, Berkeley, professor specializing in digital forensics, \u201cthere\u2019d be like one or two fake things out there; they\u2019d get debunked pretty fast. \u2026 Now you see hundreds of them, and they\u2019re really realistic.\u201d Farid added: \u201cIt\u2019s not just realistic, it\u2019s landing \u2014 it\u2019s landing hard. People believe it and they\u2019re amplifying it.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\"An<\/p>\n

\n \u201cWhat has changed in the last year or so is that generative AI has become much more widely accessible,\u201d said BBC Verify senior journalist Shayan Sardarizadeh<\/a>, a prominent debunker of war-related fakes, \u201cand it\u2019s now possible to create very believable videos and images appearing to show a significant war incident that is hard to detect to the untrained or naked eye.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n Fake videos and images that experts like Sardarizadeh have identified as AI-created have racked up tens of millions of views on social media platforms in the nearly two weeks since the Iran war began.\n <\/p>\n

\n One fake video<\/a> shows a fictional barrage of Iranian missiles supposedly striking Tel Aviv, Israel. A second fake video<\/a> depicts panicked people fleeing a supposed Iranian attack on an airport in Tel Aviv. A third fake video<\/a> purports to show captured US special forces personnel being held at gunpoint by Iranian troops.\n <\/p>\n

\n Another fake video<\/a> claims to show clips from security camera footage of Iranian military facilities being blown up; three of the clips appear to be AI<\/a>, while one is real but from last year. Yet another<\/a> fake video depicts an imaginary convoy of US troops on the ground in Iran. One more fake<\/a> looks like footage of a downed US plane being paraded through Tehran.\n <\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

\n Phony still images that appear AI-created, meanwhile, claim to depict a US military base in Iraq<\/a> and the US Embassy in Saudi Arabia<\/a> burning after Iranian attacks; Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei lying dead under rubble<\/a>; and Iranians mourning dead civilians<\/a>. A publication linked to the Iranian government even posted a fake satellite image<\/a> purporting to show damage to a US military base in Bahrain.\n <\/p>\n

\n And that\u2019s just a tiny sample of the Iran-related fakes in circulation.\n <\/p>\n

\n Despite daily debunking efforts<\/a> from people like Sardarizadeh, new fakes are popping up far faster than they can be swatted down. They\u2019re often lifelike enough that the average person scrolling through their feed can\u2019t quickly spot that they\u2019re phony.\n <\/p>\n

\n Several fakes that have spread widely have been pushed as propaganda by pro-Iran social media accounts<\/a>. The motivation behind the creation of many of the fakes, though, is hard to identify \u2014 perhaps social media views and the influence and money they can sometimes lead to, perhaps just because people were able to make them easily.\n <\/p>\n

\n The increasingly sophisticated trickery is being tossed into a difficult environment for the truth. Partisan polarization, media fragmentation and the rise of social media algorithms mean that many Americans tend to primarily see material shared by like-minded people. And Farid noted that social media companies have turned<\/a> away<\/a> from aggressive moderation of the content on their platforms.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cThe content is more realistic, the volume is higher, the penetration is deeper \u2014 this is our new reality. And it\u2019s really messy,\u201d Farid said.\n <\/p>\n

\n Social media platform X did announce last week that it was taking some action to combat wartime AI fakes. Head of product Nikita Bier posted<\/a> that if users who get paid by X as content \u201ccreators<\/a>\u201d spread AI-generated videos of armed conflicts without disclosing the videos were made with AI, they will be suspended from the payment program for 90 days and then permanently suspended if they commit additional violations.\n <\/p>\n

\n Even if this policy is strictly enforced \u2014 Farid said he is skeptical \u2014 the overwhelming majority of X users are not part of the creator payment program. (Posts from other users are still subject to crowdsourced \u201ccommunity notes\u201d fact-checking, but that has a spotty track record<\/a>.) Social media companies TikTok and Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, did not respond to CNN requests for comment on the spread of fakes related to the war.\n <\/p>\n

\n And Sardarizadeh has noted<\/a> for months that X\u2019s own AI chatbot, Grok, has actively made the problem worse in some cases \u2014 wrongly telling users seeking fact checks that numerous AI-created images and videos, including some depicting the Iran war<\/a>, are real.\n <\/p>\n

\n In fairness, it\u2019s hard these days to discern real from fake. Farid said the rapid improvement in the quality of AI creations means that tips from even months ago on how to spot AI fakery are not useful today. For example, it used to be helpful to check whether a person in an image had extra fingers or misplaced limbs; the humans represented in current AI content tend to be free of those types of comical errors.\n <\/p>\n

\n Farid said the best way to remain accurately informed is to make a choice to get your news from credible journalistic outlets instead of scrolling through posts from \u201crandom accounts\u201d on social media. \u201cIn moments of global conflict,\u201d he said, \u201cthis is not a place to get information.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n For those of us who can\u2019t avoid frequent scrolling, it\u2019s wise to take a beat and do even a few seconds of online searching before believing or sharing a sensational wartime video or image.\n <\/p>\n

\n Does anything seem off about it \u2014 audio out of sync with video, visual features that don\u2019t match the real world? AI is getting better and better, but it\u2019s still imperfect. (And some AI creations still have watermarks identifying the software that made them.)\n <\/p>\n

\n Has a well-known debunker like Sardarizadeh, a fact-checking media outlet or a subject-matter expert addressed the veracity of the video or image? (If it\u2019s fake, some professional has often pointed that out before it reaches your feed.)\n <\/p>\n

\n Are there people raising skepticism in the replies to a post or X\u2019s community notes? (Average users can deceive, but they can also ask good questions.)\n <\/p>\n

\n And what do free AI-detection tools say? (They\u2019re far from perfect<\/a>, but they too can sometimes help.)\n <\/p>\n

\n Sardarizadeh said we should be \u201ctraining our eyes\u201d to recognize AI material as best as possible. But he also said, \u201cIt is becoming extremely difficult to detect AI-generated content, and the trajectory appears to be heading in the direction of it becoming even more difficult soon.\u201d\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"After Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, social media was littered with crude fakes that were presented as fresh…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":528838,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[62,276,277,49,48,61],"class_list":{"0":"post-528837","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-ca","12":"tag-canada","13":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/528837","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=528837"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/528837\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/528838"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=528837"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=528837"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=528837"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}