Purported Synthesia Avatars Used in Alleged Pro-Junta Deepfake Video Supporting Ibrahim Traoré in Burkina Faso
January 23, 2023
In January 2023, purportedly AI-generated videos reportedly began circulating on WhatsApp and social media showing avatars of apparent American pan-Africanists expressing support for Burkina Faso's military junta. The videos were reportedly created using the Synthesia platform. Synthesia later confirmed the videos violated its terms of service and banned the user. The source of the videos remains unidentified.
- Alleged deployer
- pro-ibrahim-traore-information-ecosystem, unknown-actors
- Alleged developer
- synthesia
- Alleged harmed parties
- truth, general-public-of-burkina-faso, general-public, epistemic-integrity, national-security-and-intelligence-stakeholders, general-public-of-west-africa
Source
Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/1091
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.