Description: A purported 36-minute AI-generated deepfake video circulated online portraying Pope Leo XIV delivering a speech to Burkina Faso's President Ibrahim Traoré. The Vatican Press Office and Catholic broadcaster Patrick Madrid publicly confirmed the video was fabricated.
Editor Notes: This incident is part of a cluster of reported deepfake videos circulated online to promote Ibrahim Traoré’s leadership, all of which are seemingly contributing to a wider disinformation campaign linked to pro-junta sentiment. The cluster seems to have arisen in March 2025 and continued through to at least the end of May 2025. See also Incident 1091 for a 2023 deepfake incident involving similar themes.
Entities
View all entitiesAlleged: Unknown voice cloning technology developer and Unknown deepfake technology developer developed an AI system deployed by Unknown actors and Pro-Traoré information ecosystem, which harmed Truth , Roman Catholic public and Pope Leo XIV.
Alleged implicated AI systems: Unknown voice cloning technology and Unknown deepfake technology
Incident Stats
Incident ID
1092
Report Count
1
Incident Date
2025-05-23
Editors
Daniel Atherton
Incident Reports
Reports Timeline
Patrick Madrid and producer Cyrus are sounding the alarm: a slick 36-minute video making the rounds on YouTube---supposedly a speech from Pope Leo XIV---isn't real at all. It's an AI-generated deepfake.
The video kicks off with a dramatic m…
Variants
A "variant" is an incident that shares the same causative factors, produces similar harms, and involves the same intelligent systems as a known AI incident. Rather than index variants as entirely separate incidents, we list variations of incidents under the first similar incident submitted to the database. Unlike other submission types to the incident database, variants are not required to have reporting in evidence external to the Incident Database. Learn more from the research paper.
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