From NPR
Did FBI Director Kash Patel use AI to rip off the Beastie Boys?
By Geoff Brumfiel
A promotional video for the FBI posted by director Kash Patel appears to have used AI to generate short clips nearly identical to those in the Beastie Boys' iconic music video for their 1994 classic song "Sabotage."
Patel released the video on Monday on X, in a post about the FBI's effort to combat "massive fraud." The roughly-two minute video used the instrumental version of the song "Sabotage," and footage nearly identical to the original music video, interspersed with what appeared to be authentic footage of FBI agents conducting their work.
By Tuesday it had received roughly half-a-million views.
An analysis by NPR shows at least six clips in the FBI video were frame-by-frame recreations of shots in the iconic "Sabotage" music video, which was directed by Spike Jonze. The clips featured vehicles, people and buildings that were incredibly similar to the original video, but with small differences that would likely be generated by AI...
The clips were likely created by taking screenshots or short clips from the original "Sabotage" music video and feeding them into an image-to-video model, Hany Farid, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley who specializes in the analysis of digital images, wrote to NPR in an email. It's also possible that the AI model generated the video clips itself because the original music video was in its training data – though Farid believes that's less likely.
In any event, Farid believes AI was involved: “The similarities are hard to explain otherwise,” he wrote...
Hany Farid is a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Sciences and the School of Information at UC Berkeley
