By Hazel Gandhi
A video purporting to show News24's Manak Gupta predicting a win for Aam Aadmi Party (AAP)'s candidate from West Delhi in the Lok Sabha elections is fake and has been created using an AI-generated voice clone of Gupta.
BOOM found that the claims are false; both Manak Gupta and the verified handle of Today's Chanakya exit poll on X clarified that the video was a deepfake.
In the viral video, Manak Gupta is heard saying in Hindi, "Hello, you are watching 'Rashtra ki baat' and I am Manak Gupta. Let's talk aboutthe Lok Sabha elections in Delhi. The INDIA bloc has a clear edge in Delhi this time. According to the Today Chanakya exit poll, 7 out of the 6 seats in Delhi will be won by the INDI Alliance. Mahabal Mishra from West Delhi is turning out to be very promising. 58% of the votes in West Delhi will go to Mahabal Mishra whereas 39% of the votes will go to the NDA."
BOOM recently debunked a similar video that carried an AI-generated voice clone of news anchor Sudhir Chaudhary predicting a win for Mahabal Mishra in West Delhi.
The video of Manak Gupta is being shared on Facebook with the caption, "In the survey of the biggest media TV Today Chanakya, a clear wave of Mahabal Mishra is visible. It seems that Mahabal Mishra will win by 5 lakh votes."
(Original text in Hindi: "सबसे बड़े मीडिया TV टूडे चाणक्य के सर्वे में महाबल मिश्रा की साफ लहर दिखाई दे रही हैं। ऐसा लगता है की महाबल मिश्रा 5 लाख वोटो से जीतेंगे।")
Click here to view the post and here for an archive.
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FACT CHECK
BOOM found that the video is a deepfake and has been made using an AI-generated voice clone of Manak Gupta. The Today's Chanakya exit poll has not made any predictions about the result of the Lok Sabha elections yet.
We first ran a search for any exit polls that predicted Mahabal Mishra's win in West Delhi, including the Today's Chanakya poll, but did not find any results.
A keyword search for 'Manak Gupta' on X led us to his post from May 24, 2024, where he had shared the viral video and called it fake. "This video of mine which is going viral is completely fake. My video has been taken from my show 'Rashtra Ki Baat' and my AI generated voice has been inserted in it. All the graphics are also fake," he wrote.
Read the full post below:
Click here for an archive.
Today's Chanakya's X handle quoted the post by Gupta and called the viral video fake while writing, "We have not released any Opinion poll on Delhi or any other state. All polls in our name are fake & does not belong to us."
Further, we ran the viral video through contrails.ai, an AI detection tool that confirmed the confirmed the video was AI-generated and classified it as an "AI Audio Spoof."
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