Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo- video Jul 28, 2023

CASE DESCRIPTION

A video released on Friday, July 28 2023, shows the RSF militia leader, Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, surrounded by his soldiers after months of physical disappearance has generated a lot of debates, as there is an opinion growing popular that it's an AI-generated

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ANALYSIS PROCESS

Limitations to keep in mind: The resolution of the video is very low, which could cause some visual artifacts as a result of compression that may potentially interfere with the detection models. Two detection tools provided inconsistent results when looking for AI manipulation, but these findings cannot be considered reliable due to the low compression level. Other forms of manipulations might have taken place, our teams looked for AI deepfakes and could not find consistent evidence for it.  

Below is a process provided by three teams:

  1. Assessment provided by Medex Forensics
  • Medex Forensics, a digital video authentication company, was asked to review the video to determine if it had signs of manipulation. Because of the nature of the video - a compilation of a number of different cameras and camera angles - Medex's authentication analysis was not relevant for the evaluation. However, the team did note in their visual review of the video that  one moment of note takes place at approximately 1:10 of the first Twitter video, where the viewer can see a camera operator on the right side of the screen filming the same thing that is being displayed in the main video. The syncronization between the monitor screen on the camera and the video the viewer is viewing is quite tight for a significant portion of the visual component of this video to be manipulated. This would not rule out audio or face-level mainpulation. Other tools are more suitable for those types of analyses.

  1. Assessment provided by the University of Campinas, Brazil
  • This team used a frame-level detector based on the proposal of the paper "Detect and Locate: Exposing Face Manipulation by Semantic- and Noise-Level Telltales". The indication of the detector is that there is no evidence of manipulation by deepfake methods on the face of Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo. The evaluation was made at different moments of the video, and in none of the evaluations did our detector indicate the presence of deepfake.
  • Limitations to keep in mind: The detector evaluates the video frame by frame. And because of that, the method cannot capture artifacts that depend on the temporal relationship of the frames, which is the main limitation of this detector. Furthermore, the method only detects manipulations on faces.

  1. Assessment provided by Reality Defenders
  • This team used 4 in-house video detectors. Their detectors look at different things in the video. One is looking for blood flow in the face, one is looking at any sort of face swap, and the other two are looking for other well-known manipulation techniques:
  • One didn’t return a result due to the low quality.  
  • One did, but the team ignored it, again due to the quality, since it cannot be reliable.  
  • The other two did not detect a deepfake.

Therefore the team concluded that they couldn’t find evidence for detecting any deepfakes in this video.