India has seen an uptick in political deepfakes on the internet.
An AI-generated voice clone of Congress leader Rahul Gandhi is viral on the internet, where he can be heard swearing in as the Prime Minister of India.
Congress supporters were found sharing the voice clone along with music and a video montage showing Mr Gandhi and shots of the Red Fort in Delhi.
The clip was viral on social media, with users sharing it with a caption that read, "The day is soon... on June 4... The Prime Minister will be Rahul Gandhi..." An archived version of such a post can be viewed here.
June 4 refers to the day of counting for the ongoing Lok Sabha elections when the results for elections are expected to be announced.
Fact-checker BOOM downloaded the video, separated the audio file to run it through two different AI detection tools, and found it to be an AI voice clone. It first ran the audio clip through Itisaar, a deepfake analysis tool created by the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Jodhpur. The tool confirmed that the audio has been AI-generated.
BOOM also tested the audio clip through another deepfake detection tool contrails.ai, which further confirmed that the audio clip has been generated using AI voice cloning.
The report generated by contrails.ai stated that the technique used in creating the audio was a "very cheap AI audio clone mixed with loud BG music".
With the ongoing Lok Sabha Elections 2024, India has seen an uptick in political deepfakes on the internet. BOOM has earlier fact-checked several videos of celebrities manipulated using AI to falsely attribute a political message.
Last week, we also fact-checked an AI voice clone of Congress leader Kamal Nath, where he can be heard promising land to Muslims for the construction of a mosque, and the reinstatement of Article 370.
(This story was originally published by BOOM, and republished by NDTV as part of the Shakti Collective.)