Days after the Philippine Senate declined to launch the impeachment trial of the country’s vice president (VP), two interviews with people arguing for and against the move went viral. Neither were real.
The schoolboys and elderly woman making their cases were creations of artificial intelligence (AI), examples of increasingly sophisticated fakes possible with even basic online tools.
“Why single out the VP?” a digitally created boy in a white school uniform asks, arguing that the case was politically motivated.
Photo: AFP
The Philippine House of Representatives in early February impeached Philippine Vice President Sara Duterte on charges of graft, corruption and an alleged assassination plot against Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr, her former ally and running mate.
A guilty verdict in the Senate would have resulted in her removal from office and a lifetime ban from Philippine politics.
However, after convening as an impeachment court on June 10, the senior body immediately sent the case back to the House, questioning its constitutionality.
Philippine Senator Ronald dela Rosa shared the video of the schoolboys — since viewed millions of times — praising them for having a “better understanding of what’s happening” than their adult counterparts.
The vice president’s younger brother, Davao Mayor Sebastian Duterte, said the clip proved that “liberals” did not have the support of the younger generation.
When the schoolboys were exposed as digital creations, the vice president and her supporters were unfazed.
“There’s no problem with sharing an AI video in support of me. As long as it’s not being turned into a business,” Sara Duterte told reporters.
“Even if it’s AI... I agree with the point,” Dela Rosa said.
The video making the case for impeachment — also with millions of views — depicts an elderly woman peddling fish and calling out the Senate for failing to hold a trial.
“You 18 senators, when it’s the poor who steal, you want them locked up immediately, no questions asked, but if it’s the vice president who stole millions, you protect her fiercely,” she says in Filipino.
Both clips bore a barely discernible watermark for the Google video-generation platform Veo.
Fact-checkers also identified visual inconsistencies, such as overly smooth hair and teeth, and storefronts with garbled signage.
The man who created the fish peddler video, Bernard Senocip, 34, told reporters that it took about five minutes to produce the eight-second clip.
Reached via his Facebook page, Senocip defended his work in a video call, saying that AI characters allowed people to express their opinions while avoiding the “harsh criticism” frequent on social media.
“As long as you know your limitations and you’re not misleading your viewers, I think it’s fine,” he said, adding that — unlike the Facebook version — he had placed a “created by AI” tag on the video’s TikTok upload.
Senocip said that his work was simply a way of expressing his political opinions.
The schoolboy video’s creator, the anonymous administrator of popular Facebook page Ay Grabe, declined to be interviewed, but said his AI creations’ opinions had been taken from real-life students.
Using AI to push viewpoints via seemingly ordinary people can make beliefs seem “more popular than they actually are,” said Jose Mari Lanuza of the Sigla Research Center, a nonprofit organization that studies disinformation. “In the case of the impeachment, this content fosters distrust not only towards particular lawmakers, but towards the impeachment process.”
While some AI firms have developed measures to protect public figures, Jose Miguelito Enriquez, an associate research fellow at Nanyang Technological University, said the recent Philippine videos were a different animal.
“Some AI companies like OpenAI previously committed to prevent users from generating deepfakes of ‘real people,’ including political candidates, but ... these man-on-the-street interviews represent a gray area, because technically they are not using the likeness of an actual living person,” Enriquez said.
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