Videos of him cooking jerry, cutting sugarcane, and hugging voters and crying have been circulating on social media recently.
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Candidates for the upcoming elections are busy wooing voters in their respective constituencies. In this race, the campaign of former media personality and Aam Janata Party candidate from Rautahat-4, Rishi Dhamala, has also started to be widely seen on social media.
His videos, sometimes cooking jerry, sometimes cutting sugarcane, and sometimes hugging voters while crying, have recently been making waves on Facebook, TikTok, and YouTube.
Meanwhile, a video claiming that Dhamala fell while riding a bicycle has gone viral on social media. In the video, a person who looks like Dhamala wearing a garland of food is seen riding a bicycle. Some young people and children who look like locals are standing around. Within a few seconds, the person can be seen falling while riding a bicycle.
The video was posted on the Facebook page ‘How is America?’ at 11:05 pm last Thursday. By the time the news was prepared, the video had been viewed more than three lakh times and had received more than 1,500 reactions and hundreds of comments. But, did Rishi Dhamala really fall while riding a bicycle?
To determine the authenticity of the viral video, we used a tool called ‘Hive Moderation’ to identify ‘deepfake’ content. The tool showed that the video could be created by AI up to 96 percent, so we also tested it on the ‘Invid’ verification tool to further confirm it.
When the ‘keyframes’ of the video were extracted from ‘Invid’ and analyzed in detail, Dhamala’s facial structure and arm length appeared unnatural. In some frames, signs such as facial distortion and body proportions were found. All these grounds confirm that the video was created by AI.
