Trump delivered to us this uncanny video in which he denounces the killing of Kirk and blames the left’s rhetoric as the sole cause of this unfathomable act.

Am I crazy, or is this obviously AI?

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[–] 135 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (29 children)

I posted this earlier.

He straight up loses a finger.

Slowed down:

Zoomed in on the fingers.

Use the time line to scrub the video. He loses the pinky and gains an additional digit on top, and everything just shifts down one register.

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  • [–] 61 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (12 children)

    I think this may be just interpolation weirdness. Apparently the video was recorded in 24fps but encoded in 60.

    See this analysis, I posted it in another comment: https://youtube.com/shorts/hXhDB1fK7ok

    Edit: worth noting the interpolarion may be done by a similar AI engine which explains why it looks so similar to AI generated footage. Similar technology as the motion smoothness on TVs or DLSS frame gen. If it truly is 24-60fps and the interpolation is done by AI this would indicate over half the frames are AI generated. Would explain a lot while not necessarily meaning the video as a whole is AI.

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  • [–] 20 points 1 year ago* (7 children)

    just visually track the tip of his middle finger. And keep track of how many fingers are supposed to be past it.

    His middle finger litterally becomes his ring finger.

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  • [–] 27 points 1 year ago (6 children)

    I know, im seeing what you mean. I'm saying that could very much be an issue with interpolation. Especially if its AI interpolation. I edited my comment to add a bit more detail but its possible that over half the frames of this video are AI generated while the video itself is still real. Obviously I cant say for sure that that's what is happening but this very much could be an interpolation artifact. Even in non-genAI interpolation, weird smudginess and morphing of fast moving objects in interpolated frames is a common and well known issue.

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  • [–] 15 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    I could accept AI enhanced, but also, like...I've been looking at it a lot.

    He's way too still. Uncannily still. The chair doesn't move. At all. It's in high resolution. But isn't.

    And the finger thing. Its such an extremely well established issue with these kinds of videos.

    It's got enough red flags I'll be looking for more coverage on the matter.

    Regardless, it's so unbelievably wildy inappropriate to be doing any kind of ai enhanced or even smoothed editing to the words of a world leader when those words have incredible weight impact and are effectively legally binding.

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  • [–] 35 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    I'm looking at it more and I'm fairly certain this is just interpolated.

    Look at this frame:

    Seems to me to be pretty normal. No weird hand stuff, fingers look fine.

    Now look at the next two frames, particularly the second one:

    Totally jank. Fingers are blotchy, there's a ghost finger, overall looks super fake. But then look at the next two frames:

    Second to last has a little bit of weirdness still, but by the last frame it looks totally legit and real. No blotchy fingers, no ghost fingers, overall looks very normal.

    That kind of behavior - where some frames look completely fine and in between ones look blotchy and weird - is exactly what you expect from motion interpolation.

    Look at the example on a cat video on wikepedia, for instance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_interpolation

    The framerate is much lower on the original video here, but you can see a lot of the same kinds of artifacts. Blotchy limbs, "ghosts" in movment, things morphing in ways they shouldn't... its very similar to what's seen in the trump video. And mind you, to my knowledge this video is done with older interpolation methods that had nothing to do with genAI.

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  • [–] -5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    he loses a damn finger right there

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  • [–] 11 points 1 year ago

    I know. But that can totally happen in interpolated frames. Look at the cat video on the Wikipedia page. There are moments when the toy dissapears, when the kittens head splits into two, when one arm morphs into another... stuff like this is totally possible and even common for motion interpolation.

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  • [–] -1 points 1 year ago (3 children)
  • [–] 17 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    See some of my later replies. I've looked at it frame by frame and it looks exactly like the artifacts you'd see from motion interpolation. They can look very similar to AI artifacts.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    Are you differentiating between AI Interpolation and just simply AI? It feels like people saying it's AI you push back on.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    Yes. People seem to be saying this is not a real video and that the white house generated it with AI. That is what I would say it means to say the video "is AI" - particularly because an AI interpolated video is still a real video.

    Whether the interpolation is done with AI or not, I don't know. AI interpolation is fairly common but there are older methods that produce similar artifacts. Based on some of the interpolated frames I'm leaning slightly towards it being AI interpolation but I don't know well enough to say.

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  • [–] 72 points 1 year ago (3 children)
  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago*

    Oh dang, I saw that post earlier and thought it was probably just him repositioning his hands, but it really was my phone not having enough resolution.

    Edit: although the motion interpolation also makes sense. I withdraw my comment, because I frankly don’t know enough about ai nor do I have good enough eyesight to responsibly have a position on this.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    whut, he just moves them so his index finger is mostly behind the middle one? you can still see it. what am I missing?

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  • [–] 85 points 1 year ago (9 children)

    I feel like we should've seen this coming; if/when he kicks the bucket, they're gonna use AI to keep the cult of personality going for as long as they can.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    This White House leaks worse than Trump's asshole. If he died, there's a better then small chance that staffers would accidentally invite a journalist to their Signal chat about it. It's just not something they can keep secret.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    I am inclined to agree.

    But I bet they'd try to sell the lie anyway.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 child)

    This is why the overwhelming majority of conspiracy theories are likely false. People often can't even keep a secret about a crime they themselves committed. A whole group of people keeping a complete lid on something like that for any large length of time isn't very believable.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    This right here.

    I've recently been seeing a lot more of what I've heard called Blue Anon. I am seeing it get argued against. Shit could get real ugly if it takes hold.

    I'm having to repeatedly remind my family to check sources, think critically, and not jump to conclusions.

    It's imperative we remain skeptical and analytical.

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  • [–] 28 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    There's definitely a weird sped-up "twitch" moment that occurs around 20 seconds in. I didn't detect it elsewhere after watching most of it (without sound) but at the very least there seems to be some smoothing-type postprocessing going on.

    But does he really keep his hands that still for such long periods? Haven't paid much attention to that aspect of "serious" press releases but that stands out to me, even if it's a teleprompter job and he's trying to keep from accordiflailing.

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  • "Vibe Presidenting"

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  • [–] 29 points 1 year ago

    You telling me this guy is our first Vtuber president?

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  • [–] 14 points 1 year ago

    that's just what he looks like now.

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  • [–] 38 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (6 children)

    Oh my... y'all need to chill.

    Download yt-dlp and run this command, to get CNN's 'direct' 245MB stream on your hard drive instead of AP's (or YouTube's) tiny re-encodes on a web player:

    yt-dlp -f direct https://www.cnn.com/2025/09/10/us/video/trump-oval-office-statement-white-house-charlie-kirk-death-digvid

    See that combing? It's interlaced.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlaced_video

    Or telecined, I think, to be more specific. While it's impossible to know what the actual feed from the White House looked like, re-encodes I'm looking at are clearly de-interlaced (poorly) which is why motion looks so weird. It's also choppy and MPEG-blocky, hallmarks of poor encoding even in a 13.9 Mb/s stream, and recompressing that to a tiny bitrate makes it even worse.


    Y'all (and apparently the rest of the internet) are obsessing over literally decades-old video encoding/broadcasting issues and oldschool video filters to fix them that have nothing to with AI.

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  • [–] 9 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Why would there be interlaced video in 2025? Fuck do they still have a tube tv?

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago*

    The video encoding crowd was screaming that that 10 years ago, heh. And 20 years ago.

    ...Shrug. I guess people are still getting 'traditional' cable broadcasts. Turn on YouTube TV, and you can see they still use those ancient codecs (even though its all streamed), probably because they have to just comply with the system.

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  • [+] 4 points 1 year ago (1 child)
  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

    Agreed.

    Though I wouldn't disparage investigation and 'figuring things out.' I'd perhaps rephrase that: "I don't have much experience with this topic, maybe I should qualifty my certainty," as a sentiment, seems to have disappeared. The Trump admin is kind of a perfect embodiment of that.


    To be clear, I'm not an expert here either. I'm not a broadcast engineer or anything and would defer to some news source that actually knows what they're talking about... but I do know just enough Vapoursynth to be dangerous, and have seen what looks like this exact artifacting in way, way too many TV show broadcasts...

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  • [–] 12 points 1 year ago

    There's a lot of uncanny movement for sure. It looks almost like it's stabilized sometimes.

    I'd say it's either AI or Disney animatronic.

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  • [–] 12 points 1 year ago

    It looks like it at a glance but I'm pretty sure that's just how he is when he tries to read a script...

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  • [–] 12 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    Maybe AI enhanced, but it's probably just interlacing

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  • [–] 22 points 1 year ago

    I disagree. I recently saw this analysis:

    https://youtube.com/shorts/hXhDB1fK7ok

    It seems pretty thorough, and this guy specializes in exactly this. Some of the weirdness seems to be due to a miss match between the 24fps the video was filmed in and the 60fps it was encoded in.

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  • [–] 10 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Connecting the dots between this video and his droopy public appearance yesterday: he's clearly recovering from stroke-type symptoms, probably a TIA.

    Notice the persistent rightward tilt of his head and that he only moves his left hand. The uncanny mouth movements people have pointed out are probably an AI touch up to correct his facial droop. They basically propped him up for this video and kept him out of the spotlight during yesterday's public appearance.

    My money is that he's projected to recover (they wouldn't be able to hide a paralyzed president forever) but it's another mark against his health claims. If it was a TIA it could be foreshadowing The Big One

    About 1 in 3 people who has a TIA will eventually have a stroke, with about half occurring within a year after the TIA.

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  • [–] 9 points 1 year ago

    This is another problem with the "AI" grift. Since there's no such thing as "AI", the term is constantly misused to the point of meaninglessness.

    Is this video just edited? Or is it edited with "AI"?!?!?! There's no fucking difference. It's all just computers doing shit with absolutely zero "intelligence".

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  • [–] 17 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    I see everyone here talking about specific parts of the video and how it's fake because of various imperfections in the rendering. You are all thinking WAY too hard about this. When was the last time you saw trump speak for that long without some narcissistic rant thrown in off script? For him to accomplish this video he would need a level of reading comprehension that we have never witnessed from him before. THE REAL TRUMP IS ILLITERATE. No fucking way could he have read a teleprompter that quickly.

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  • [–] 8 points 1 year ago

    I've been thinking of late that his tweets look AI generated. You just enter something like: take today's news from a reputable source, invert all the facts, add lots of hyperbole, and capitalize words for emphasis.

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  • [–] 20 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    It is generated, yes, he took a still and the team crafted the script and the prompt later on.

    Signs to look for:

    Speed the video up: no breathing pattern. Close ups: hands millimetre steady plus it morphs quite heavily Skin: loses wrinkles gains dark spots plus color shifts on the edges where it meets the hair

    This is bad, but it will fool millions.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago

    Soooo did he die too?

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  • [–] 36 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

    The real boring dystopia is that keyboard warrior idiots with no video editing experience will create these type of posts and mislead entire communities.

    It is not a deepfake, and I believe leaving posts like this up or without correction in the title damage Lemmy’s reputation.

    Please consider changing title or take down the post. I explain the edit here.

    https://lemmy.world/comment/19325281

    Edit: the post has finally been removed. This was my explanation

    I’m afraid it’s still not deepfake. It’s a fast cross dissolve cut. “Charlie was a [|] patriot”. It matches his dialogue. You can see above his head in the window that the green blur in the trees changes at the same time.

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  • [–] [S] 6 points 1 year ago* (1 child)

    I’ve left the post up, but edited the title. I would encourage you to reach out to the mods if you feel my changes are insufficient.

    Thank you for your contributions!

    The real boring dystopia is that we have so little trust in our government that we suspect this at all.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago*

    The real boring dystopia is obsession the internet seems to have over something being 'AI' or not.

    This is a perfect example. We're looking at deinterlacing and blocking artifacts that have plagued reuploaded broadcasts for decades, and that pixel peepers have complained about that entire time, yet these ancient filters are being called out as 'AI'. And it has little to do with Trump and the government: this would happen to anything high-profile enough using a telecined broadcast system.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago

    What a wild time to be alive, man.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago* (3 children)

    There is software (I think it comes with Adobe stuff) that allows you subtly morph/crossfade instead of jumpcut, so if the speaker pauses or flubs a line you can remove it without an obvious, distracting jump.

    I think that’s probably what we’re seeing here.

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    [–] 10 points 1 year ago (6 children)

    Why do you think it’s AI?

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  • [–] 26 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    The movements are all wrong. I think they've used AI to enhance the video and/or hide jump cuts.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Could it be similar to the recent Will Smith incident where YouTube was doing AI enchantments?

    I think I could see AI editing being the issue. But I have a hard time believing they’d just deep fake an entire segment for this to be played nationally. I don’t doubt that day will come – but would like to think it wouldn’t be for an issue like this.

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  • Maybe he recorded one but it was unusably bad, leading his minders to put it into the slop machine for a touch-up. Even if he sees it later on, it's not like he'd remember what he said once the little squigglies on the prompter go away. They're free to change whatever they want.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    His speech is way to coherent.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago*

    “Ol Charlie, like a son to me… like Charlie Tuna, you remember that one, right? Until the radical left lunatics killed him too. Wanted a woke androgynous oyster to replace him. Oyster gender transitions, its a whole thing and were not gonna pay for it. Absolutely tragic”

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  • [+] 18 points 1 year ago (9 children)
  • [–] 13 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    I would not put it past Donny Bonespurs to have Kirk assassinated as either a distraction or to use as a pretext for more power grabs.

    I'll admit it's a little tin foil hatty but considering he views other people as completely disposable, I don't think it's that far fetched.

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  • Nah that just doesn't make sense. He doesn't need any pretexts because he's already getting everything he demands and more handed to him on a silver platter at every opportunity, and if he wanted one anyway he'd just make it up and bullshit everyone like his lot always does

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

    I thing the shooter was a groyper who is upset about the Epstein reversal. Sorry SRA people, having trouble seeing a leftist one-shotting the neck from 250 yards away.

    But yeah this will be used as a pretext but if not this there would have been other pretexts, Like how he used big balls getting pantsed by a girl to declare marshall law in DC.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Leftist gun enjoyer reporting in - 250 yards is achievable for most people if you practice, depending on your setup. Even a mid grade rifle’s mechanical accuracy can ‘group’ a 9” circle at that range, throw a zoom optical scope on top and done.

    Mid to long range shooting is a trifecta of shooter skill, knowledge of environment conditions, and quality of equipment. The further the distance, the more of each you need. That kind of range and precision was viable with basically every bolt action deer gun in America, and most hunters using them tbh.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago*

    Yeah but most SRA types have a hardon for antique Soviet garbage like SKS. "If it was good enough for the NVA it's good enough for me."

    Also it can be really hard to find a 200+ yard range in most blue states while local hillbillies in Utah would have now trouble finding a place to plink around at 400 yards just for fun.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago

    Hahahahaha, wtf is this? Is this real life? They made an AI fuckoff video for their dead Nazi agitator? Couldn't even be bothered to film it with the Pedo-in-chief live?

    Where the fuck is trump, gonna need proof of life after this shit. Cankles finally got him?

    Release the Epstein files - Republicans are pedophiles and pedophile protectors.

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  • Everything changes shape frame by frame.

    The hell is going on?

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago

    Yeah I think it’s both interlaced and AI. We know his face isn’t looking too good lately. Worse than normal, but you can’t see any signs of that in the video. Maybe he got some Botox?

    The hands are weird but that’s but that’s not what is giving me uncanny valley vibes.

    it’s the movement of Trump himself. I had to go find some other videos of him of the Oval Office trading from a teleprompter. I watched some older videos but, just look at the differences in the speech given 9/9 on about the NC stabbing vs this one on 9/10.

    He tends to lean back and forth while he talks and he likes to do a thing where he emphasizes points with his chin. I don’t see any of that here.

    It feels like that trend where people were using AI to bring pictures to life. Like it’s him but they enhanced it with AI or edited the hell out of it. I mean it’s definitely multiple clips spliced together. You can see and hear those cuts if you pay attention.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    He's visibly had a stroke judging from a recent photo. I think the AI was to improve the droop on one side of his face.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    Of course they fucking did lmbo

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    So I could also impersonate myself to be way more coherent?

    I wonder is I could make my self lase too...I might need a little tickle to get me started...

    Oh, no photonics experts on here....I'll phase my self out....

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