What was claimed
Videos show the Australian border force on ships intercepting small boats, including one where an official shoots near people in a dinghy.
Our verdict
These videos aren’t real and were made using artificial intelligence.
AI-generated videos of heavily armed Australian border force at sea shared thousands of times
Videos supposedly showing the Australian border force intercepting small boats have been shared thousands of times on Facebook. But they’re not real, and were made using artificial intelligence (AI).
The videos have been shared with captions such as “Australia is taking strong action to protect its borders” and “Australia is tightening border controls in response to growing immigration concerns. The UK should do the same”.
The clips show border force officials stopping vessels, with one threatening to open fire and then doing so.
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When we put the videos through Google’s large language model (LLM) Gemini it told us all of them had a SynthID digital watermark in both the audio and visual components, indicating they were generated or altered with Google AI.
There are also a number of visual clues they were made with AI. Several faces and bodies are distorted and blurred, parts of the boats glitch and bodies morph into one another.
Under “Operation Sovereign Borders” policy in Australia, which has been running since 2013, anyone who attempts an unauthorised boat voyage to Australia will be turned back to their point of departure, returned to their home country, or transferred to a third country for processing.
There have been calls for the UK to implement a similar policy. But these dramatic viral videos are AI-generated.
We increasingly find ourselves fact checking AI-generated videos. Before sharing clips such as these, first consider whether they come from a verifiable and trustworthy source. Our guide to spotting AI content, and toolkit on how to identify bad information, can help you do this.
This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as altered because these videos aren’t real and were made using artificial intelligence.