A video of former head of the Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW) Vikram Sood, purportedly praising Pakistan for its 'smart' role in the Iran-Israel-US conflict, comparing it to India's approach to the same, is being widely shared on social media.
What does he say?: The clip is being shared to claim that Sood said, "I think the nation that has played the most smartly amongst all this is Pakistan. India always wanted to become a net security provider but Pakistan has become a net stability provider for both China as well as United States. Our foreign minister needs to learn from their strategies, as they have maintained neutrality while retaining their bias. This is a very clever tactic that they use, and it is working for them."
But...?: The claim is false as the video is an altered one. There is no evidence of Sood praising Pakistan's geopolitical strategy.
How did we find out the truth?: We ran a reverse image search on the video, which led us to a YouTube short by news agency ANI, showing similar visuals of Sood speaking to a person.
Responding to a query related to the Iran-Israel-US conflict, Sood said the Iranians were "playing to their strengths," saying that the conflict had gone on for longer than the Americans had anticipated.
"Remember, the Iranians are willing to die. Americans are not willing to die on the ground in Iran. They're very, very nervous about body bags coming home. So they want to keep it to air attacks, missile attacks as far as possible," Sood said, adding that he did not think that this strategy would be effective in the short run.
The agency shared the same clip on their official X account as well.
A keyword search for the term 'Vikram sood praising Pakistan' did not return any relevant results supporting the statement made in the claim.
Is it AI?: We ran the video through Hiya's Deepfake Voice Detector and Hive Moderation's AI-generated content detector, both of which said that the video was likely to be authentic.
Despite there being an authentic version of the video, the publicly accessible versions of both tools failed to identify AI-related manipulation in this video.
We then shared the video with the Deepfakes Analysis Unit (DAU), which also ran it through multiple detectors.
During their check, Hive's audio classifier said that the audio was not AI-generated, however, it found the video to contain several frames that had been tampered with using AI.
Resemble AI's report on the clip showed that the audio track was found to be synthetic with high confidence, and it noted that the video was a deepfake as well.
Sood clarifies: In a series of X posts on his account, Sood confirmed that the videos were fakes.
He shared a post with his authentic statement, confirming that the clip shared by ANI was the one which was altered to make the false claim.
He also shared an instance of the claim, calling it "an absolute fake in Pakistan's usual clumsy style."
Conclusion: An AI-manipulated clip is being shared to claim that former R&AW chief Vikram Sood praised Pakistan for their geopolitical role in the Iran-Israel-US conflict.
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