AI incident #1032 ·
Reported Doctored Video of Nigerian President Bola Tinubu Claims Naira Will Be Replaced by U.S. Dollar
What happened
A reported viral video circulated in Nigeria in the late summer and early fall of 2023 falsely claiming that President Bola Tinubu announced plans to replace the naira with the U.S. dollar. The video, reportedly styled as a news segment from Arise News, was allegedly digitally altered using AI-generated audio and lip-sync manipulation. Arise News publicly denounced the clip as a deepfake, and no legitimate media sources corroborated the claim. The video appeared amid public anxiety over Nigeria'
Only the incident metadata is stored here. The underlying news reports are on the AI Incident Database (CC BY-SA 4.0); use the links above to read them.
News reports (1)
Coverage catalogued by the AI Incident Database. Titles link to the original publisher; the text is not reproduced here.
Who was involved
- Alleged deployer
- Unknown Actors
- Alleged harmed party
- General Public Of Nigeria, Bola Tinubu, General Public, Epistemic Integrity, National Security And Intelligence Stakeholders, Journalistic Integrity
Classification (MIT AI Risk Repository taxonomy)
- Risk domain
- Misinformation
- Risk subdomain
- 3.1 False or misleading information
- Causal entity
- AI
- Intent
- Intentional
- Timing
- Post-deployment
- Harm level
- —
- Sectors
- —
- Countries
- —
Risk entries describing this failure mode
Entries from the MIT AI Risk Repository coded to subdomain 3.1.
- Pursuing Consistent Context
"LLMs have been demonstrated to pursue consistent context [129]–[132], which may lead to erroneous generation when the prefixes contain false information. Typical examples include sycophancy [129], [130], false demonstra...
- Knowledge Gaps
"Since the training corpora of LLMs can not contain all possible world knowledge [114]–[119], and it is challenging for LLMs to grasp the long-tail knowledge within their training data [120], [121], LLMs inherently posse...
- Hallucinations
"LLMs generate nonsensical, untruthful, and factual incorrect content"
- Faithfulness Errors
"The LLM-generated content could contain inaccurate information" which is is not true to the source material or input used
- Defective Decoding Process
In general, LLMs employ the Transformer architecture [32] and generate content in an autoregressive manner, where the prediction of the next token is conditioned on the previously generated token sequence. Such a scheme...
- Untruthful Content
"The LLM-generated content could contain inaccurate information"
- Factuality Errors
"The LLM-generated content could contain inaccurate information" which is factually incorrect
- Noisy Training Data
"Another important source of hallucinations is the noise in training data, which introduces errors in the knowledge stored in model parameters [111]–[113]. Generally, the training data inherently harbors misinformation....
Incidents in the same risk subdomain
- Nonfiction Book 'The Future of Truth' Reportedly Included AI-Generated and Misattributed Quotations
- Claude Console Reportedly Generated Phantom Legal Quotations in Trump Layoffs Court Filing
- Purportedly AI-Enhanced Images of Iranian Women Protesters Were Reportedly Spread With Unverified Execution Claims
- South Africa Draft National AI Policy Reportedly Included Fictitious References Believed to Be AI Hallucinations
- Purportedly AI-Generated Image Reportedly Misled Daejeon Authorities Searching for Escaped Wolf Neukgu
- Gemini and Grok Reportedly Misidentified Authentic Minab School-Strike Graveyard Photo as Unrelated Disaster Imagery
Other incidents involving Unknown Actors
- Alleged Marine Park Orca Attack on 'Jessica Radcliffe' Reportedly an AI-Generated Hoax
- Purported AI-Generated Audio Was Reportedly Used to Claim Recep Tayyip Erdoğan Expressed Support for Imran Khan in Pakistani Parliament
- Purported AI-Generated Video Depicts Trump Urging Release of Nigerian Separatist Leader Nnamdi Kanu
- Reported AI-Manipulated Video Depicts Donald Trump Endorsing Peter Obi and Criticizing Bola Tinubu