HISPI Project Cerebellum HISPI PROJECT CEREBELLUM

Purported Synthesia Avatars Used in Alleged Pro-Junta Deepfake Video Supporting Ibrahim Traoré in Burkina Faso

January 23, 2023

In January 2023, controversial videos emerged on WhatsApp and social media featuring purportedly AI-generated avatars voicing support for Burkina Faso's military junta. Suspected to have been created via the Synthesia platform, these videos were found to have breached the platform's terms of service. The originator of the videos remains undisclosed.

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Matched TAIM controls

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

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.