Bihar Elections: AI-Manipulated Clip Viral as Manoj Bajpayee Campaigning for RJD

The original video shows Manoj Bajpayee featuring in an advertisement for OTT platform, Amazon Prime

Fact-Check: This video has been created with the help of AI tools. 

(Source: The Quint) 

A video showing actor Manoj Bajpayee is going viral on social media.

• In the clip, Bajpayee can be seen campaigning for Rashtiya Janata Dal (RJD) leader Tejashwi Yadav.

• Bajpayee is shown conversing with various individuals who remind him that "Tejashwi Yadav will take charge of the next government in Bihar on 14 November."

• 14 November is the counting and result day for the Bihar elections, as per the Election Commission of India.

An archive of the post can be found here. 

(Source: X/Screenshot) 

(Archives of similar claims can be found here and here.)

Is the claim true?: No, the claim is false as this video is altered using artitifical intelligence (AI).

• The original video shows Bajpayee featuring in an advertisement for the OTT platform, Amazon Prime Video.

• AI-detection tools also concluded that the audio in the viral video was created using AI.

What we found: At first, we divided the video into multiple screenshots and ran a Google reverse image search on some of them.

• It led us to the same video on YouTube, uploaded to Amazon Prime Video's YouTube channel on 1 November 2023.

• In the video, Bajpayee can be seen taking film recommendations from people and not campaigning for the RJD for the upcoming assembly elections in Bihar.

• We ran a relevant keyword search to check whether Bajpayee had extended support for the RJD but, we did not find any credible statements or reports.

• The keyword search led us to a post on X by Bajpayee from 16 October, which stated, "I would like to publicly state that I have no association or allegiance with any political party. The video being circulated is a fake, patched-up edit of an ad I did for Prime Video. I sincerely appeal to everyone sharing it to stop spreading such distorted content and urge people not to engage with or encourage such misleading content." (sic.)

AI-detection tools: For further verification, we extracted the audio from the viral video and ran it on the AI-detection tool, Hive Moderation which concluded that the audio was 99.4 per cent 'likely' AI-generated.

Here are the results by Hive Moderation.

(Source: Hive Moderation/Screenshot) 

• Additionally, Team WebQoof spotted the word "spoof" on the bottom right corner of the video.

Here is the close-up of the frame.

(Source: X/Altered by The Quint) 

Conclusion: The viral video is created using AI tools and is not real. Bajpayee has not campaigned for Yadav or his party.

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