The first international use of AI to fabricate a video of a BJP politician campaigning in English and Haryanvi — languages he doesn’t speak.

In 2020, I broke the news of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) President Manoj Tiwari, sanctioned the creation of his own deepfake video for an election campaign. The 44-second monologue used lip-sync dubbing to make clips of Tiwari campaigning in English and Haryanvi—languages he doesn’t speak—saying that the opposition had “cheated” people. It was shared across 5,800 WhatsApp groups  ahead of the Delhi elections, without any mentions of the fact it had been made using AI.

The report raised serious ethical concerns about the possible use of deepfakes to spread political misinformation, and drew international attention to AI labelling. My reporting was widely aggregated by U.S publications including The Verge, MIT Tech Review, The New York Times, and others. I went on NDTV (National Television) to discuss the report.

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