Last week, the White House posted a video of President Donald Trump speaking about right-wing activist Charlie Kirk in the wake of the latter’s assassination while debating students at Utah Valley University. Trump expressed condolences to Kirk’s family and called him a “martyr for truth and freedom.” He also calls on the American people and media for the “tragic consequence of demonizing those with whom you disagree.”
Some social media users suggested the video was generated using AI, pointing out a “weird moment” at the 19-second mark when the president’s hand changes position briefly.
AI expert Hany Farid, a professor at University of California-Berkeley who studies misinformation and image analysis, called the claims baseless. Farid told The Dispatch Fact Check in an email, “I have reviewed this video and find no evidence that the audio or video is AI-generated. Our audio analysis found no evidence that the voice is AI-generated, and our video analysis finds no inconsistencies between Trump’s mouth movement and his voice as you might expect to see in a lip-sync or avatar deepfake.”
Addressing the visible distortion of Trump’s hands, Farid states, “It is not clear to me if this is AI-editing or simple video editing, but there is some localized video manipulation here.” Other video-editing professionals have claimed that the hand glitch could be attributed to a “morph cut” where two clips are sewn together in the editing process. The technique is used to stitch together multiple takes of the same video, to cut filler words, or speed up pacing.
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