The Princess of Wales’s ring vanishing during a video of her revealing her cancer diagnosis confirms it is a deepfake video created using AI.
This isn’t the case. In high resolution versions of the video of Catherine, Princess of Wales, her wedding ring briefly blurs as she moves her left hand, but can be seen throughout.
Posts shared widely online have falsely claimed that the video in which Catherine, Princess of Wales revealed her cancer diagnosis was created using Artificial Intelligence (AI) due to her wedding ring ‘disappearing’.
But high resolution versions of the video show her ring does not disappear and BBC Studios have confirmed that they filmed the clip.
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Catherine confirmed in a video message on Friday that she has begun preventative chemotherapy after an unspecified cancer diagnosis.
It followed weeks of speculation in the media and on social platforms after she had been absent from public view following pre-planned abdominal surgery in January.
A Mother’s Day photograph issued by the family was pulled by news agencies after inconsistencies within the image were spotted. A post on X (formerly Twitter) from the Prince and Princess’s account, attributed to Catherine, said: “Like many amateur photographers, I do occasionally experiment with editing. I wanted to express my apologies for any confusion the family photograph we shared yesterday caused.”
This fuelled further unfounded claims about the Princess, including that newspaper footage of her at a farm shop with the Prince of Wales in mid-March was actually of a body double.
Since the release of the video by Kensington Palace on 22 March which revealed the princess’ cancer diagnosis, users on X (formerly Twitter), Facebook and TikTok have claimed that during the footage, her wedding ring ‘vanishes’, allegedly proving that the video has been generated using AI and is a ‘deepfake’.
While AI-generated deepfakes are becoming more sophisticated and common on social media, we can find no evidence to support this claim.
In high quality versions of the full video Catherine’s ring does not disappear while she is talking as has been claimed.
It only appears to do so (1 minute and 19 seconds into the original clip) in low quality, and slowed down versions, and some stills, as her fingers blur in motion when her left hand moves. But this is not a visual glitch proving that the video is not authentic.
Slowed down versions of the higher quality clip show her wedding ring slightly blurry when she moves her hand and hidden when her left hand moves behind her leg.
The two minute and twenty second long clip was filmed by a team from BBC Studios, a commercial arm of the BBC, not by the Royal family’s team.
A statement by BBC Studios issued on 23 March and widely reported by media outlets confirmed they had filmed it at Windsor Castle.
Full Fact contacted BBC Studios, which confirmed the same details in a response to us. PA Media news agency has reported that it understands BBC Studios made no edits to the recording.
As technology improves, realistic deepfakes—where AI tools are used to mimic the face or voice of a public figure—are becoming harder to spot, and erode public trust in genuine footage.
We have written an extensive guide on how to identify if a video or audio clip has been created using AI, and debunked a number of actual deepfakes, including of the Labour leader Keir Starmer and Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
Image courtesy of Ian Jones, Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office
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 false because the Princess of Wales’ ring does not disappear during the clip, which BBC Studios confirmed it filmed.
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