HISPI Project Cerebellum
AI Incidents

Campaign Featuring Purported AI-Generated Audio Attributed to Omar al-Bashir Spreads During Sudanese Conflict

August 20, 2023

Beginning in late August 2023, a TikTok channel called The Voice of Sudan circulated purported AI-generated audio claiming to be leaked recordings of former Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir. Experts identified several recordings as voice-cloned fabrications, derived from unrelated broadcasts by a political commentator. The campaign emerged during Sudan's civil war and appeared designed to influence political perceptions. TikTok later removed the account for violating synthetic media policies.
Alleged deployer
the-voice-of-sudan
Alleged developer
unknown-voice-cloning-technology-developers, unknown-deepfake-technology-developers
Alleged harmed parties
omar-al-bashir, general-public-of-sudan, general-public, epistemic-integrity, truth, national-security-and-intelligence-stakeholders

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/1087

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.