An AI Video of the French President Kissing a Man Was Manipulated From Real Photos

A fake, AI-generated video of French President Emmanuel Macron kissing a man was manipulated using real photos taken by paparazzi photographers in a shocking example of how AI video generators can spread misinformation.

The photographs were taken on July 28 and published in French tabloid magazine Voici showing the President relaxing on a boat off Fort de Brégançon.

In some of the photos, he wrestles with a friend and it is these stills that have been fed into an AI video generator and manipulated so it looks like Macron is kissing his friend.

Full Fact, a charity that checks and corrects facts, says the earliest example of the video was shared on August 2 to X (formerly Twitter) with the caption translated from French reading: “The President’s Vacation According to AI… It’s demonic.”

But then bad actors on Facebook and X took the AI video and made posts interspersing it with the real photos published in Voici.

One of the posts was viewed over six million times a well as being shared under false pretenses on Facebook.

At a quick glance, perhaps the AI imagery is convincing but as Full Fact notes there are telltale signs that it is synthetic. For example, the bald man’s arm disconnects from his wrist as he puts his handless arm around Macron. The President’s stomach bizzarely ripples in the video and the rocks also shimmer in the background.

Full Fact says that it did a reverse image search on one of the real photos which led it to the Voici article,

AI Video Generators Animating Still Photos

Artificial intelligence is both loathed and feared with apparently little love for the technology from commenters on the internet.

With AI video proliferating, it’s not just novel AI clips generated from a prompt that will begin to appear.

A video released on YouTube last month using AI to animate historic photos has received over 200,000 views and while the short movies are amateurish and incoherent, it is likely that the algorithmic technology will improve and people will use apps like these more and more.

The creators of the above video used Luma Labs Dream Machine; a free AI video generator which users can immediately sign up for and start making videos from either a text prompt or a still image.