Oct 2026IndiaUnidentified video tool
In late October 2026 a video circulated on social media in which Lt Gen Girish Kalia, who commands the Indian Army's Spear Corps, appeared to say that China had taken control of areas of Arunachal Pradesh and that Indian forces lacked supplies. India TV reports that the Army called the video fake, said it had been made by editing an old video of the officer with the help of AI, and posted the original footage; India TV also reports that some opposition politicians had reposted the video and asked the government to respond. The fact-checker BOOM traced the footage to the officer's October 2023 media briefing in Kupwara about infiltration across the Line of Control, and reports that a deepfake voice detector rated the viral audio as likely a deepfake. Who made the video is not reported.
Core concern Low reported severity Media Coverage
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 2 sources · Added 27/10/2026
20 Oct 2026Event location unknownUnidentified video tool (suspected)
On 20 October 2026, during early voting in Texas, a newly created X account posted two videos in which a man presented himself as a former student of James Talarico, the Democratic US Senate candidate and a former middle-school teacher, and accused him of sexual assault in 2012. The threat-intelligence firm Graphika said the account very likely impersonated a real Facebook user of the same name who had been Talarico's student and had praised him, assessed the videos as very likely deepfakes because the face moved unnaturally or out of sync with the audio and AI analysis tools indicated AI generation, and attributed them with high confidence to the Russia-aligned influence operation Storm-1516. PolitiFact reported that NewsGuard found many signs of AI generation and a 98 percent detector score, and that the real former student told the fact-checkers Lead Stories the video was not of him and denied accusing Talarico. Talarico's campaign said he was being slandered with AI deepfakes, foreign bots and conspiracy theories. PolitiFact rated the claim Pants on Fire. Who made the videos and how many people saw them is not established.
Core + contextual relations Medium reported severity Media Coverage
AI involvement suspected · Causal attribution supported · 2 sources · Added 25/10/2026
10 Oct 2026 to 15 Oct 2026Event location unknownUnidentified image tool
Between 10 and 15 October 2026 a Swedish-language Facebook page published twelve posts about Mohamed Abdukardir Ali, a Left Party (V) member of the Riksdag, including claims that he had confessed to election fraud and that police had detained him in the middle of a press conference. The fact-checking site Källkritikbyrån reported on 16 October that the claims are false and the images AI-generated, and linked the page through a shared administrator account to BeeUp, a Vietnamese firm that presents itself as a viral marketing agency. SVT Verifierar reported on 17 October that the images claim he confesses to election fraud and has been arrested, and that comment after comment on Facebook reacted with demands such as 'Utvisa honom!' (deport him). The posts built on real reports of suspected election irregularities connected with his personal-vote campaign in Borlänge, which he denies. No source names the image tool, describes how the images were identified as AI-generated, or reports his response to the fabricated posts.
Core concern Low reported severity Media Coverage
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 3 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 18/10/2026
7 Jan 2026 to 9 Jan 2026United StatesGrok
After a federal immigration agent killed a woman in Minneapolis on 7 January 2026, X users circulated AI-generated images that purported to show the masked agent's face. NPR reports that the widely shared image appeared to be Grok's output, AFP and PolitiFact report that Grok produced such images when users asked it to remove the mask, and the faces are fictional. Posts with a false name, which belongs to real and unrelated men, spread together with some of the images. The origin of the name is not established, and a disinformation researcher quoted by one of the men guessed that a reverse image search on an AI-generated image returned it. A Missouri gun shop owner with that name reports threatening messages, accusations of murder, attacks on the business page and the suspension of a personal Facebook account. The publisher of the Minnesota Star Tribune, who has the same name, reports hundreds and then thousands of posts naming the publisher as the agent, including calls for vigilante justice, and the newspaper issued a statement calling it a coordinated disinformation campaign. AFP reports that xAI answered its inquiry with an automated reply. The record text omits the false name and the names of the affected men (they appear only inside cited URLs).
Core concern Medium reported severity
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 7 sources · Added 30/09/2026