The Government Information Service (SIG) wanted to capitalize on the trend for AI-generated videos and badly tripped up. On the occasion of National Resistance Day, the SIG thought it was doing the right thing by sharing a 30-second video on social media (TikTok and Instagram) telling the story of an imaginary resistance fighter.
A German soldier celebrates the liberation of Paris
She can be seen distributing clandestine newspapers, being captured by German soldiers, and then celebrating the liberation. The video was clearly posted online without anyone having previously targeted it, given the embarrassing inaccuracies it contains. The young woman can be seen walking down a street in occupied Paris, wearing a blue-white-red armband ostensibly reminiscent of those of the Resistance. We'll be considered discreet...
Then comes the joy of the liberation in 1944, in which everyone participates... including a German soldier! He exults with joy in the crowd, just behind our heroine. And when we say that everyone participates, it really is the case: we also see a flag at a window... Japanese. Who at the time was still at war in the Pacific, and not on the right side of history.
Finally, there are the usual AI quirks, like this newspaper that seems to tear as it's slipped into a mailbox. The video was quickly removed from social media, but too late: the internet never forgets and it is still visible elsewhere (see here).
Caught red-handed talking nonsense, the SIG nevertheless "takes responsibility". The director of the service, Michaël Nathan, explained to Le Monde that his teams had "the challenge of adapting content and narrative forms to new audience uses, particularly on social networks."
"AI tools are never used alone and each script is prepared and validated by agents, ministries and specialists, based on reliable and sourced elements," the manager said. Very well, but how can we explain these errors that even a layman's eye can spot very easily?
The problem here is that "the visual translation of the script, however, was not viewed by the latter." You don't have to be a historian to find it a bit much to see a German soldier parading during the Liberation. A new version of the video "verified by historians from the Fondation de la Résistance" will be published soon.
Source: Marie and Julien
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