Purported AI-Generated Video Portrays Pope Leo XIV Addressing Ibrahim Traoré of Burkina Faso

May 23, 2025

A 36-minute deepfake video, allegedly generated by AI, went viral online purporting to show Pope Leo XIV delivering a speech to Burkina Faso's President Ibrahim Traoré. The Vatican Press Office and Catholic broadcaster Patrick Madrid confirmed the video's authenticity was fabricated.

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

MAP 1.3 — similarity 0.552, rank 1. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MAP 1.6 — similarity 0.541, rank 2. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MAP 3.4 — similarity 0.541, rank 3. TAIM detail and related incidents →

Alleged deployer: unknown-actors, pro-traore-information-ecosystem
Alleged developer: unknown-deepfake-technology-developers, unknown-voice-cloning-technology-developers
Alleged harmed parties: truth, roman-catholic-public, pope-leo-xiv

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/1092

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.

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