No, Muhammad Yunus Did Not Announce Resignation as Bangladesh Chief

The audio of Yunus resigning has likely been generated using AI tools and is not authentic.

A video showing Chief Adviser of Bangladesh Muhammad Yunus, seeming to announce his resignation as the interim head of state, is being shared on social media.

The video: In the clip, Yunus appears to say, "I, Muhammad Yunus, the Chief Adviser of Bangladesh, hereby announce my resignation. I have just resigned from the interim government. I also hand over my power to Pinaki Bhattacharya and dismiss the army chief Waker-uz-Zaman."

But...?: The video is altered. There are no credible reports or official announcements to support the claim.

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How did we find out the truth?: We ran a keyword search with the term 'Muhammad Yunus resignation', which showed us several older news reports regarding Yunus telling people that he would resign if the attacks against minorities did not stop amid the violence in Bangladesh.

However, we did not find any reports mentioning that he had actually resigned, indicating that the video may have been tampered with.

The video: We noticed that Yunus' mouth did not match the words heard in the video.

• To detect manipulation, we used TrueMedia, a deepfake detection tool.

• As per its analysis, the tool detected substantial evidence of manipulation in the audio as well as Yunus' face.

The Quint sent the video to Contrails.ai, a Bengaluru-based AI startup working on detecting AI-generated content, for analysis.

Their report found that Yunus voice appeared to be fully AI generated and that his lip movements did not match the audio in the claim.

Additionally, two of their models predicted the audio to be AI generated, with "high confidence."

The Deepfake Analysis Unit's findings: The DAU ran the clip through Loccus.ai's audio detection tool, which revealed that there was a "high probability" that the audio was AI-generated.

• Hive AI’s deepfake detection tool did not detect any AI-related manipulation in the video, but it detected manipulation in the audio portion of the clip.

• The DAU also put the audio through ElevenLabs' speech classifier, which said that it was "very unlikely" that the audio clip used in the video was generated using their software.

• When they reached out the ElevenLabs regarding the analysis, they said that they were "unable to confirm that the audio was A.I.-generated."

Expert analyses: For more expert analysis, the DAU shared the video with the Global Deepfake Detection System (GODDS), an AI detection system by the Northwestern University’s Security & AI Lab (NSAIL).

• Out of their 22 deepfake detection algorithms, 14 models indicated the higher probability of the video being fake, while the remaining eight indicated otherwise.

• The GODDS team, in their report, mentioned that the audio "appeared to be misaligned" with the subject of the video, suggesting that the video was not authentic.

• The report noted "moments when the audio continues even as the subject no longer appears to be talking," and spotted jump cuts in the video.

• The Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT)'s DeFake project said that the video appeared to be a "cheapfake with generated audio."

• Their team noticed that the audio did not sound "very much like Yunus" and noted a "sharp cut" in the video, and that Yunus's mouth appeared to be "fairly out of sync from the actual audio" in most places in the video.

Conclusion: The video of Muhammad Yunus resigning as the chief adviser of Bangladesh is fake.

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