What was claimed
A video shows a Royal Navy officer telling an interviewer that small boat crossings of the English Channel are a violation of British sovereignty.
Our verdict
This video is fake. The presence of the SynthID watermark and visual glitches show it has been created with artificial intelligence.
A video claiming to show a Royal Navy officer telling an interviewer that small boat crossings of the English Channel are a violation of British sovereignty is fake.
The clip, which has gained hundreds of comments and thousands of reactions on Facebook, shows a man in what appears to be white dress uniform speaking into a microphone on the deck of a ship flying the Union Jack.
He states: “Illegal immigration across the English Channel is a direct violation of British sovereign waters. Our primary military duty is to defend the realm, but these undocumented crossings are challenging that control every single day.
“If a nation cannot firmly secure its maritime borders against unauthorised entry, it loses its fundamental security.”
However, this is not genuine footage of a military official. It has been created using artificial intelligence (AI).
The footage contains SynthID, an invisible watermark added to content made with either Google or OpenAI’s tools. This clip contained Google’s SynthID throughout both the visuals and the audio.
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There are also other clues that it was generated with AI, including the appearance of the man’s face altering during the course of the footage, and other objects in the background, such as a radar on top of the ship, glitching and morphing.
But many of the accounts commenting on the video appear to be taking it at face value.
Before engaging with content like this that you come across online, it’s important to consider whether it comes from a trustworthy and verifiable source. Our misinformation toolkit contains tips on how to do this, as does our guide to spotting AI fakes.
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 this isn’t a real interview with a Royal Navy officer, but an AI-faked video.
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