HISPI Project Cerebellum HISPI PROJECT CEREBELLUM

Purported Deepfake Depicts Altercation Between Bougainville President Ishmael Toroama and Papua New Guinea Prime Minister James Marape

April 7, 2025

A deepfake video falsely depicting an altercation between Bougainville President Ishmael Toroama and Papua New Guinea Prime Minister James Marape circulated online. The misleading content caused public confusion and potentially jeopardized diplomatic relations. Toroama denounced the fake video as malicious, destabilizing, and emphasized the need for stronger guardrails in AI governance to prevent such incidents.

This incident underscores the importance of safe and secure AI practices and highlights the role Project Cerebellum plays in the harm prevention aspect of HISPI's TAIM (Govern, Map, Measure, Manage). For those interested in shaping responsible AI discourse and ensuring trustworthy AI, consider joining our project by clicking JOIN US.

Sources:
1. [The National](https://www.thenational.com.pg/post-courier-deepfakes-video-purportedly-shows-pm-marape-in-physical-altercation-with-bougainville-president)
2. [RNZ Pacific](https://www.rnz.co.nz/pacific/programmes/dateline-pacific/470153/deepfake-video-of-bougainville-pm-and-png-prime-minister-sparks-confusion)

Matched TAIM controls

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

Alleged deployer
unknown-actor(s)-provoking-tensions-between-papua-new-guinea-and-bougainville
Alleged developer
unknown-deepfake-technology-developers, unknown-voice-cloning-technology-developers
Alleged harmed parties
james-marape, ishmael-toroama, government-of-papua-new-guinea, general-public-of-papua-new-guinea, general-public-of-bougainville, bougainville-autonomous-government

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/1162

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.