Trump calls video of bag thrown out of White House fake. A White House official reportedly suggests otherwise
By Kerem Inal, Chris Looft, Isabella Murray, and Hannah Demissie
During an Oval Office event, President Donald Trump was asked about a video that began circulating online this past weekend of what appears to be a bag being thrown out of a second-story window at the White House...
ABC News has not independently verified the video's authenticity. But one expert said it appeared unlikely the video is an AI fake. Hany Farid, chief science officer at GetReal Labs and an expert on synthetic media, told ABC News that he does not see any evidence that indicates the video is AI-generated.
“I’m not seeing any evidence that this video is AI-generated or manipulated,” Farid said. “We do not detect any digital watermarks that are sometimes inserted at the point of AI-generation. The shadows in the scene, including the shadow cast by the tossed bag, are all physically consistent. The motion of the waving flags has none of the tell-tale signs that you often see in AI-generated videos. The overall structure of the White House appears to be consistent, including the flying of the American and POW/MIA flag.”
Farid noted that AI-based video generation models today typically produce videos no more than eight to 10 seconds long, a limitation that can be circumvented by stitching two clips together by generating a new video based on the final frame of the last one...
Hany Farid is a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Sciences and the School of Information at UC Berkeley.
