HISPI Project Cerebellum HISPI PROJECT CEREBELLUM

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

October 12, 2023

In October 2023, a misleading deepfake video spread across social media, falsely suggesting that Zambian president Hakainde Hichilema would not participate in the 2026 elections. Fact-checkers and digital forensics experts debunked this claim, confirming the video was altered using AI tools. The footage traced back to a TikTok account specializing in AI-generated content.

This incident underscores the importance of safe and secure AI practices. For those interested in shaping responsible AI governance, join us at HISPI Project Cerebellum. By contributing to our AI incident database, you can help establish guardrails for AI and promote harm prevention through TAIM (Track, Analyze, Improve, Map) initiatives.
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Matched TAIM controls

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

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.