Video of military convoy patrolling border made with AI | Fact check
The claim: Video shows US troops patrolling the southern border
A Jan. 23 Facebook post (direct link, archive link) includes a video that appears to show military vehicles driving near a metal border wall.
“Our Military is now securing America's Border instead of foreign countries,” reads the post's caption.
Similar posts were shared on Facebook. A version of the post on X was reposted more than 10,000 times in four days.
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Our rating: Manipulated media
The video was generated by artificial intelligence. It originated from the TikTok account of a user who frequently posts digitally created videos and labels them that way.
Video of border convoy created with artificial intelligence
President Donald Trump declared a national emergency at the southern border in one of the first acts of his second term. He ordered the U.S. military to repel “forms of invasion,” including illegal immigration and drug trafficking, as Paste BN previously reported. The White House has since announced that the Pentagon plans to send 1,500 additional active-duty troops to the U.S.-Mexico border.
However, the video in the Facebook post isn’t real. It originated on TikTok, where the user who posted it included a label that said it was AI-generated. The user’s account includes “Ai Creater (sic)” and “Parody and Satire” in the bio, and many other posts that feature digitally created videos of military vehicles and personnel at the border.
The video also includes a watermark in the upper right corner for PixVerse, an AI video creation platform.
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Walter Scheirer, an engineering professor at the University of Notre Dame, found other clues that the video was AI-generated.
“The overall scene is not realistic and is instead cartoon-like in appearance, containing several obvious artifacts,” Scheirer told Paste BN in an email.
For example, Scheirer pointed out that three soldiers appear out of nowhere in the back of the lead vehicle about three seconds into the video. There is also an "unnatural-looking haze around the drones in the sky" and a vehicle in the convoy with a "malformed windshield," he said.
Paste BN reached out to the social media user who shared the post for comment but did not immediately receive a response.
Lead Stories also debunked the claim.
Our fact-check sources
- Walter Scheirer, Jan. 27, Email exchange with Paste BN
- BizaroEarthling, Jan. 23, TikTok post
- BizaroEarthling, accessed Jan. 27, TikTok account
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