A video of Elon Musk, talking about a conspiracy theory around the death of TV show Friends star Matthew Perry, who was found dead in October 2023, is doing the rounds on social media. In the video, the popular American podcaster, Joe Rogan, can also be seen.
The above post can be seen here (archive). Another such post can be seen here.
FACT CHECK
NewsMobile fact-checked the above video, and found it to be digitally altered.
At first glance, the video seems authentic and the voice of Musk is quite identical. However, upon closely observing the video frame-by-frame, the NM team noticed discrepancies in the lip sync.
Putting the video through Hive Moderation — a tool designed to detect AI-generated content — it was analysed that the viral video is 55.8% likely to be AI-generated.
Running the video keyframes through Reverse Image Search, it was found that the original video on the official YouTube channel — PowerfulJRE, dated May 07, 2020, has over 16.8 million subscribers. The two-hour-long video is of a popular podcast of Elon Musk with Joe Rogan.
On comparing both videos, we came to know that the viral clip was extracted from Musk’s podcast with Rogan. However, the words spoken by Musk in his voice in the viral clip were superimposed using deepfake technology.
On closely analysing the original video and its transcript, we discovered that nowhere in the entire podcast Musk spoke about Matthew Perry.
It is to be noted that the original video was posted in May 2020, whereas Matthew Perry died in October 2023.
With the above findings, it can be concluded that the video in question is manipulated using deepfake technology.
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