Crying Ukraine soldier video appears to be AI fakepublished at 11:59 GMT 5 November
Thomas Copeland
BBC Verify Live journalist
A viral video appearing to show a young Ukrainian soldier crying as he is sent to the front line appears to be AI-generated disinformation.
In the video, a man records himself saying through tears that he has just turned 23 and doesn’t want to die.
Reverse image searches suggests it originated from a now-deleted TikTok account which shared AI-generated videos claiming to show Ukrainian soldiers crying.
In some videos on the account the watermark for Sora, a text-to-video AI model made by OpenAI, is clearly visible. But it is not present on this video.
The video is made up of two short clips, one of four seconds and the other of 10 seconds, edited together. The brevity of the clips is an indicator of AI-generation, as most models can only produce continuous shot of up to 10 seconds.
Another indicator it is pro-Russian disinformation is his supposed age, because conscription in Ukraine only applies to men between 25 to 60 who are fit for military service.
This deepfake has been spread widely by anti-Ukraine social media accounts, with one post gathering nearly two million views on X.
Some of the post’s captions are directed at Ukraine’s allies, encouraging them to end their support.
The account that originally posted it has now been removed from TikTok and we’ve asked the platform why it was deleted.
