Netanyahu's videos aren't AI, but how would you know that?
The AI-generated future we feared is arriving now.
A sitting head of state had to post a proof-of-life video this week, responding to online rumors that he was dead and his government was using AI to cover it up. Call me crazy, but I think that’s a really big deal.
This happened because a video address by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was opportunistically screenshotted where it looked like his palm was a sixth finger. This wasn’t an AI generation artifact. In fact, I talked about how AI videos mostly fixed hands in my first-ever TikTok video almost a year ago. The AI accusations didn’t come from credible sources, but that didn’t stop the general public from getting really confused.
Pixel-peeping skeptics and attention-seeking creators are finding false-positive “AI artifacts” in every video that Netanyahu has posted since then. Many of the publications that arrived at this conclusion have been accused of being paid off by Israel or AIPAC.
Some commentators are dismissing this as an antisemitic conspiracy. But we can’t dismiss that the public deals with AI videos every day. Their confusion in this case is a natural reaction to their information environment.
This should be a major wake-up call for leaders in tech and government. I see this distrust every day in my inbox. It’s spilling out into the real world, and it’s getting worse.
Figuring out what’s real
Why am I so sure that Netanyahu’s address is real?
It’s a very long, single-camera take (eight minutes and twelve seconds long). That would be an insanely, nearly impossibly long AI video. Even an AI video that’s 20 seconds long struggles with temporal consistency. And without any visible edits or other AI artifacts, it would have to come from a theoretically very advanced AI model — one that doesn’t exist in public yet, and one that certainly wouldn’t add a sixth finger if it existed privately.
