Deepfake Video Goes Viral to Claim Dr Devi Shetty Was Attacked Recently on TV
This is a deepfake video and does not show Dr Devi Shetty getting attacked while promoting plant based drugs.
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A video showing a news anchor explaining how a doctor was assaulted during a news debate is going viral on social media.
It also features news channel Aaj Tak's logo and shows a man attacking another person.
It adds Dr Devi Shetty's clip speaking about the attack where he also claims that he has developed a new plant based medicine that would help prevent cardiovascular diseases.
How did we find out the truth?: We performed a reverse image search on some of the keyframes of the viral video on Google which led us to a YouTube video shared by News Nation.
This was uploaded on 13 January 2017 and showed late Swami Om, a self-proclaimed Godman, participating in a debate on News Nation, but he got engaged into a brawl with other panelists and audiences.
Swami Om made several headlines that year over controversial statements that he made on the reality show Bigg Boss 10.
In this video, nothing was mentioned about Dr Devi Shetty or medicines related to cardiovascular issues.
Another reverse image search on Google led us to original video of the doctor speaking.
A video was shared by NDTV Profit on 24 November 2022, titled: “BQ Exclusive: Dr. Devi Shetty on Health, Heart & Healing.”
In this video, the doctor does not mention anything about being attacked or does not promote any pant-based heart medicine, as claimed.
He discusses about cardiovascular diseases, diabetes and health insurance.
We also checked another keyframes of the viral video on Google and found the original video shared by Al Jazeera on 1 June 2021.
It showed Dr Shetty, the founder of Narayana Hrudayalaya working in a hospital in Bangalore.
We also performed a simple keyword search on Google using 'Dr Devi Shetty plant based medicine for cardiovascular diseases' but it did not give us any relevant information.
We also did not find any such video on Aaj Tak's channel.
Deepfake AI technology: We noticed that the anchor or the doctor did not have a proper lip sync with the audio.
After examining the video using AI detection tools, the Misinformation Combat Alliance (MCA) and Deepfakes Analysis Unit (DAU) concluded that the video was created by patching different clips together and adding AI-generated audio tracks in the background. Here are the detection tools that they used:
The voice detection tool of Loccus.ai, showed that the the probability of the video being real was only 17.33 percent, indicating that it was AI-generated.
The voice was analysed on Loccus.ai.
(Source: DAU)
Results on TrueMedia’s deepfake detector also revealed that this was 100 percent an AI- generated audio.
Screenshot shared by DAU from TrueMedia.
(Source: DAU)
They also used Hive AI’s audio detection tool which yielded results about the audio being AI-generated.
DAU's partners, ConTrails AI, a Bengaluru-based startup, also used its audio-spoof detection AI model to check the authenticity of the audio track in the video. The results showed that AI was used to fabricate the voices being attributed to both the news anchor and Shetty in the viral video.
Conclusion: A deepfake is going viral to claim that Dr Devi Shetty was attacked during a TV interview.
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