HISPI Project Cerebellum
AI Incidents

Deepfake Video Reportedly Depicts Zambian President Hakainde Hichilema Withdrawing from 2026 Election

October 12, 2023

A viral video circulating on social media in October 2023 falsely claimed that Zambian president Hakainde Hichilema announced he would not run in the 2026 elections. Fact-checkers and digital forensics experts confirmed the video was manipulated using basic AI tools. The footage originated from a TikTok account known for AI-generated content.
Alleged deployer
@zambian_ai-tiktok-account, unknown-actors
Alleged developer
unknown-deepfake-technology-developers
Alleged harmed parties
hakainde-hichilema, general-public-of-zambia, electoral-integrity, democracy, united-party-for-national-development-(upnd)

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/1022

Data source

Incident data is from the AI Incident Database (AIID).

When citing the database as a whole, please use:

McGregor, S. (2021) Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-21). Virtual Conference.

Pre-print on arXiv · Database snapshots & citation guide

We use weekly snapshots of the AIID for stable reference. For the official suggested citation of a specific incident, use the “Cite this incident” link on each incident page.