Fact-Check: This Video of Rajat Sharma Talking About US, Tariffs Is AI-Generated
The audio in the viral claim has been created using Artificial Intelligence and is not authentic.
advertisement
A video purportedly showing India TV's editor-in-chief Rajat Sharma talking about US President Donald Trump's statement calling India a "dead economy" is being shared on social media.
In the video, Sharma can also be heard discussing US' tariffs against India, appealing to tech companies against hiring Indians, and claiming that the Indian government cut down export of generic pharmaceuticals by 50 percent while also increasing crude oil imports from Russia.
He also refers to Trump's repeated statements about facilitating the ceasefire between the recent conflict between India and Pakistan.
How do we know?: To start with, we looked for news reports about India cutting down pharmaceutical exports to the US, but did not find any credible ones.
Next, we went through Rajat Sharma's and India TV's social media and YouTube channels (links here, here, here, here, and here) to look for the same video, but saw that it was not published on any of these platforms.
On carefully watching the video, one can notice that not only in Sharma's voice flat and monotonous, but his eyes are blurry and his mouth movements don't match the words he appears to be saying.
This indicates that AI might have been used to create this video.
Is it AI?: To verify this, we ran a section of the video through Hive Moderation's AI-generated content detector.
Its tool showed 99 percent confidence in the audio being likely to contain AI-generated or deepfake content, giving the clip an overall score of 99.9 percent for the same.
Hive Moderation gave it a 99.9 percent score.
(Source: Hive Moderation/Screenshot)
DAU's analysis: We also shared this video with the Misinformation Combat Alliance's (MCA) Deepfakes Analysis Unit (DAU) for a more details analysis using a wider range of tools.
Owing to the length of the video (over eight minutes), it had to be divided into three parts for better analysis.
In their reports for the first section, Hive's AI Audio classifier found the entire audio track to be AI-generated.
It also flagged two instances showing Trump's face, stating that those sections showed indications of AI-tampering.
Trump's face was highlighted as a deepfake.
(Source: Hive/DAU)
For the first section, Hiya's audio intelligence tool said that the audio was "authentic," but showed low confidence in saying so.
DAU also ran the clip through Hiya's tool.
(Source: Hiya/DAU)
They also highlighted that Eleven Lab's speech classifier found that it was was "very likely" that the audio was created using their tools.
It showed a 98 percent probability of the video being generated using their platform.
(Source: Eleven Labs/DAU)
While Hive's audio classifier and Eleven Labs' results remained consistent for the other two sections as well, for the second portion analysed, Hiya said that the audio for that part seemed to the "generated or modified by AI," showing low confidence again.
Hiya's analysis changed for the second section.
(Source: Hiya/DAU)
Similarly, Hiya's tool showed different results for the third portion as well.
It found the final section to carry authentic audio with good confidence.
Hiya's result changed with every section.
(Source: Hiya/DAU)
For the same segment, Hive again flagged Trump's face as sections showing deepfake visuals, along with the face of a man standing beside Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Trump's face was flagged as deepfake again.
(Source: Hive/DAU)
Conclusion: A video carrying AI-generated audio is being shared to falsely claim that senior journalist Rajat Sharma did a segment about US' tariffs on India and India's pharmaceutical exports to the country,
(Not convinced of a post or information you came across online and want it verified? Send us the details on WhatsApp at 9540511818 , or e-mail it to us at webqoof@thequint.com and we'll fact-check it for you. You can also read all our fact-checked stories here.)