Vatican condemns AI deepfake of Pope Leo praising revolutionary African leader

The Vatican has highlighted how a fake video depicting the new Pope has been created with artificial intelligence before being uploaded to YouTube.

The 36-minute “speech” depicts Pope Leo XIV praising Ibrahim Traoré, President of Burkina Faso, who came to power through a 2022 coup. The Russian-backed revolutionary African leader is capitalising on anti-West sentiment to emerge as a Messianic figure for disgruntled youth, reports the Daily Telegraph.

It notes that the patronage of Russian President Vladimir Putin and and AI deepfakes combine to “boost” the 37-year-old leader’s reputation as an anti-colonial saviour.

The fake video of Pope Leo was uploaded to YouTube on the account “Pan African Dreams”, and was produced using footage from Pope Leo XIV’s audience with journalists on 12 May, reports Vatican News.

“To His Excellency President Ibrahim Traoré, President of the Sovereign Nation of Burkina Faso, son of African soil, defender of his people, may grace and peace multiply for you through wisdom, courage and truth,” begins the speech.

A so-called “morphing” technique was used – the fake video is titled “Pope Leo XIV responds to Captain Ibrahim Traoré – A Message of Truth, Justice & Reconciliation” – transforming the image so that the movement of the lips matches the AI-generated words.

Viewers are led to believe that the new Pope delivered an entire public address to Ibrahim Traoré in response to a letter sent by the controversial African leader.

In the video Pope Leo is depicted as saying: “I have read your words not once, but many times, and each reading has been deeper than the last, because in your voice I have heard not only the anger of a president, but the righteous cry of a continent long wounded by the twin blades of abandonment and exploitation.”

It is noticeable that the image of the Pope is repeated, and Leo holds the same two sheets of paper throughout the entire message, reports Vatican News. The video is one of a series of fake productions covered by BBC News on May 15.

Vatican News adds that “it is worth recalling – given the circulation on various social media of texts attributed to the new Pope without source indication – that all of Pope Leo XIV’s speeches, addresses, and texts can be consulted in full at vatican.va“.

In a meeting with the College of Cardinals, two days after his election to the papacy, Pope Leo XIV explained that he chose his papal name as a commitment to the Church’s social teaching amid a new revolution in artificial intelligence.

The Pope said there were various reasons for why he chose his papal name “but mainly because Pope Leo XIII in his historic Encyclical Rerum Novarum addressed the social question in the context of the first great industrial revolution”.

Rerum Novarum (“New Things”) is an encyclical written by Pope Leo XIII in 1891 addressing the conditions of the working classes and which deals with various social issues. It is widely hailed as having laid out the framework for the Catholic Church’s modern social doctrine and its position on social issues, which were a bedrock of Pope Francis’s pontificate.

“In our own day, the Church offers to everyone the treasury of her social teaching in response to another industrial revolution and to developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defense of human dignity, justice and labour,” Leo said in his address.