At Least 294 Purported AI-Generated Music Videos Portray Celebrities Praising Burkina Faso's Ibrahim Traoré

March 2, 2025

From March to May 2025, approximately 294 allegedly AI-produced deepfake music videos were uploaded on 127 YouTube channels. With over 8.6 million views collectively by the end of May, these videos featured globally recognized celebrities (Beyoncé, Rihanna, R. Kelly, Selena Gomez, Eminem, and Justin Bieber) praising Burkina Faso's President Ibrahim Traoré and advocating military rule. Such incidents underscore the importance of responsible AI governance and safe and secure AI practices.

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Matched TAIM controls

Suggested mapping from embedding similarity (not a formal assessment). Browse all TAIM controls

Alleged deployer
unknown-actors, pro-ibrahim-traore-information-ecosystem
Alleged developer
unknown-voice-cloning-technology, unknown-deepfake-technology-developers
Alleged harmed parties
truth, selena-gomez, rihanna, r.-kelly, justin-bieber, general-public-of-burkina-faso, general-public, epistemic-integrity, eminem, beyonce, national-security-and-intelligence-stakeholders

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/1094

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.