President Ali Bongo health recovery video accused of being a deepfake
A TV broadcast appearance of Gabon's President Ali Bongo claiming he had recovered from ill-health prompted accusations that the clip was a deepfake concocted by his government. Commentators and political adversaries noted that Bongo's appearance was marked his 'immobile' face, that his eyes were out of sync with his jaw, how little he blinked, and that his speech patterns appeared different. The clip appeared at a time when the President was out of the country receiving medical treatment, fueling rumours that he was seriously unwell. A week after the video’s release, Gabon’s military attempted a coup d'etat, citing the video as an indicator there was something wrong with the president. The coup attempt failed. However, the video was seen to have led to increased political and societal instability. Some experts have since concluded the video may not have been a deepfake, though opinion remains divided. Deepfake Deepfakes (a portmanteau of ' deep learning ' and 'fake' [1] ) are images, videos, or audio that have been edited or generated using artificial intelligence , AI-based tools or AV editing software. Source: Wikipedia 🔗 System 🤖 Unknown Documents 📃 Incident video Operator: Developer: Country: Gabon Sector: Politics Purpose: Defend reputation Technology: Deepfake; Machine learning Issue: Mis/disinformation; Transparency
- Date it happened
- 2019-03-01
This incident was imported from AIAAIC and is used under CC BY-SA 4.0. Our additions to it — the structured fields, the translation, the checks against other reports — are published under the same licence.
This is a record of what was reported, not a finding that anyone broke the law. If it names your organisation and you believe it is wrong, the corrections process is free and open to everyone.