Fact Check: AI Audio Falsely Shared As Amitabh Bachchan's Opinion On Politics

A post (here, here, and here) featuring a video allegedly released by Bollywood actor Amitabh Bachchan is doing its rounds on social media. It is being claimed that Amitabh Bachchan has finally broken his silence and made a video to open people's eyes. In the video, we can hear a man who sounds like Amitabh Bachchan making political remarks. We fact-check this claim through this article.

Claim: Video of Amitabh Bachchan expressing his thoughts on the current political situation in India.

Fact: Amitabh Bachchan has not released such a video. This video features a voice-over resembling Amitabh Bachchan's voice, generated using Artificial Intelligence. Hence, the claim made in the post is False.

To check the veracity of the viral claim, we performed a keyword search on the internet to check if Amitabh Bachchan had made or posted this video. After going through all his official social media accounts (here, here, and here), we did not find the viral video on any of them. Also, we did not find any news reports about Amitabh Bachchan making such a statement.

While going through the viral footage, we saw a watermark that reads ‘Appu Patel BJP.' Through a keyword search, we found the Facebook profile of Appu Patel, which contains videos (here, here, and here) featuring the same watermark as seen in the viral video. However, we did not find the viral video on his profile. 

This common watermark and the way clips from various movies and incidents are edited together over a voice-over made us suspect that the viral video may have been edited by this person. Also, the voice-over in the video sounds slightly off and is not 100% similar to Amitabh Bachchan's voice. With a suspicion that the voice could have been AI-generated, we ran the video through TrueMedia, an AI content detection tool that found (archive link) substantial evidence for manipulation in the voice present in the video. 

We then ran the audio from the viral video through Hive Moderation, which is also an AI content detection tool. The analysis report (archive link) of Hive showed us that there is a 99.9% likelihood of the audio being generated by AI. 

To sum up, an edited video containing a voice-over generated by AI is falsely shared as a real video of Amitabh Bachchan voicing his opinion on the current political condition in our country. 

(This story was originally published by Factly, and republished by NDTV as part of the Shakti Collective)