What was claimed
A video shows a British soldier confronting a police officer about arresting people for ‘words’ and saying they are a ‘disgrace to their uniform’.
Our verdict
This isn’t real. This clip has been created with artificial intelligence.
Video of soldier shouting at police officer is AI-generated
A video which appears to show a British soldier shouting at a police officer about arresting “people for words” has been created with artificial intelligence.
The clip has been circulating widely on social media, including on X where it has 16,000 reposts.
However, an expert in spotting AI generated content has told us there are signs this video isn’t real, and it was likely created using AI. After Full Fact contacted OpenAI, the company which owns AI video generation software Sora, they said they had taken action and banned the original creator of the video (rather than those resharing it) from its platform.
In the clip, the soldier appears to say to the police officer: “I sacrificed my life to secure this country’s freedom and its freedom of speech. And now you arrest people for words while turning a blind eye to crimes committed by invaders. You are a disgrace to your uniform and you are an insult to mine.”
Dr Siwei Lyu, an expert in digital media forensics at University at Buffalo, State University of New York, told Full Fact after analysing the clip that it was “likely AI-generated”.
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He said that its 15 second length suggests it may be created with Sora 2, an AI video generator created by OpenAI, and then cropped to remove the visible watermarks.
“There are unnatural facial expressions, a complete lack of blinking, and obvious errors on the uniform where the name tag is repeated,” he added.
“Additionally, the background looks glitchy: pedestrians seem to float or vanish into thin air, and the red bus weirdly changes its shape and color [sic] as it moves across the screen.”
The video also contains a watermark which matches that of a Facebook page called UK MODE, suggesting it originated from there—although it doesn’t currently appear on that page. But that Facebook page has also shared a number of similar videos, which, while often convincing at first glance, also have hallmarks of being created with AI, such as facial glitches or inconsistencies in the background.
While this particular video may seem obviously AI to some, we have seen accounts interacting with the clip which appear to be taking it at face value.
OpenAI told us that it had investigated the video and taken action on its text-to-video app Sora, which included banning the user who created it.
The company added it investigates and enforces against accounts that engage in harmful deceptive activity, including misrepresenting the origin of content.
Our guides can help you spot AI generated videos and images. But as AI content becomes more sophisticated and prevalent, we urge people to be cautious about content they see on social media, even if it looks highly realistic.
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 video has been created with AI, and isn’t genuine.