A campaign using artificial intelligence to impersonate the former leader of Sudan, Omar al-Bashir has received hundreds of thousands of views on TikTok, adding online confusion to a country devastated by civil war.
Africa Today News, New York reports that since late August, an unidentified account has started publishing what it claims to be ‘leaked recordings’ of the former president. Numerous clips from the channel have been posted, but the voice is not real.
Bashir, who was overthrown by the military in 2019 and has been accused of orchestrating war crimes, hasn’t been spotted in public for a year and is thought to be gravely ill. The charges of war crimes are denied by him.
His disappearance raises more questions in a nation already in turmoil following combat in April between the military, which is presently in authority, and the opposing Rapid Support Forces militia group.
Campaigns like this are significant as they show how new tools can distribute fake content quickly and cheaply through social media, experts say.
‘It is the democratisation of access to sophisticated audio and video manipulation technology that has me most worried,’ says Hany Farid, who researches digital forensics at the University of California, Berkeley, in the US.
‘Sophisticated actors have been able to distort reality for decades, but now the average person with little to no technical expertise can quickly and easily create fake content.’
The recordings are posted on a channel called The Voice of Sudan. The posts appear to be a mixture of old clips from press conferences during coups attempts, news reports and several “leaked recordings” attributed to Bashir. The posts often pretend to be taken from a meeting or phone conversation, and sound grainy as you might expect from a bad telephone line.
To check their authenticity, we first consulted a team of Sudan experts at BBC Monitoring. Ibrahim Haithar told us they weren’t likely to be recent:
‘The voice sounds like Bashir but he has been very ill for the past few years and doubt he would be able to speak so clearly.’
This doesn’t mean it’s not him.
We also checked other possible explanations, but this is not an old clip resurfacing and is unlikely to be the work of an impressionist.
The most conclusive piece of evidence came from a user on X, formerly Twitter.
They recognised the very first of the Bashir recordings posted in August 2023. It apparently features the leader criticising the commander of the Sudanese army, General Abdel Fattah Burhan.
The Bashir recording matched a Facebook Live broadcast aired two days earlier by a popular Sudanese political commentator, known as Al Insirafi. He is believed to live in the United States but has never shown his face on camera.
The pair don’t sound particularly alike but the scripts are the same, and when you play both clips together they play perfectly in sync.