A number of pro-Israel social media accounts have shared a video they claim shows wads of cash and stacks of gold bars in a cache belonging to a deceased Hezbollah leader. There's only one issue: the footage was created using AI. The original video was shared by an Egyptian satirical site.
The video, which is less than 30 seconds, shows wads of cash and stacks of gold bars in a house in ruins. The caption on the video, written in Arabic, says: “the silence of the Islamic Republic”: a reference to Iran, which supports Hezbollah.
Some of those who shared the video thought that it showed the home of a commander with Hezbollah’s armed militia, Ali Samir al-Hajj Hassan, who the Israeli army said they killed in southern Lebanon on August 15.
A number of X accounts have claimed that, prior to his death, Hassan was amassing a huge amount of money from Tehran. "Iran Watcher", which describes itself as a news site focusing on the Middle East, shared the video along with a post condemning the economic support that Iran provides to the armed Lebanese group. Especially when, as the site said, “ordinary Iranians have watched their savings and living standards collapse.”
The video was also picked up by a number of pro-Israel accounts. Israel is currently at war with both Iran and Hezbollah.
An AI-generated video
It turns out, however, that this video was generated by AI and does not show a Hezbollah cache of cash. Italian fact-checking outlet Open found the original footage posted on an Egyptian satirical site, which had the video published on August 12.
If you run the video through a reverse image search (check out our handy guide to see how), then it is possible to find the video on this Facebook page called "Egyptoon", which says it is an animation studio. The caption on the video doesn’t say anything about the house having links to Hezbollah or Iran.
If you look closely at the video shared by Egyptoon, which is better quality than the one that has been circulating online, then you can see there are a number of inconsistencies common in AI-generated images. Some of the stacks of bills look nearly square, while others don’t look like dollars at all.
Egyptoon’s logo blurred
The video above, which has Egyptoon’s logo on the upper left-hand side, is the same video that social media users have been claiming shows a Hezbollah cache. The video was altered, and the Egyptoon logo was blurred, which you can see at certain moments in the video.
With the blurred logo and distorted dollar bills, it would have been possible to identify that the video was manipulated before it was shared.
Read moreFour tips for detecting images generated by AI
This article has been translated from the original in French by Brenna Daldorph.
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