Video showing Pope Leo XIV praising Burkina Faso’s leader is AI-generated
- Published on May 30, 2025 at 10:40
- 4 min read
- By Oluseyi AWOJULUGBE, AFP Nigeria
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“Pope Leo XIV Responds to Captain Ibrahim Traore /A message of Truth, Justice and Reconciliation,” read the caption of a video posted on Facebook.
The video, published on May 15, 2025, shows the pope giving an address while holding two pieces of paper.
“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,” the pope appears to say at the beginning of the 17-minute clip.
Included is an English transcript of the audio.
The video appeared on X and Facebook accounts in Kenya, South Africa, and Nigeria.
Robert Francis Prevost became Pope Leo XIV on May 8, 2025, after cardinals from around the globe elected him, in less than two days, to be the first US leader of the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics (archived here).
However, the posts claiming to feature a video of the pontiff responding to a letter from Traore are false.
Altered video
The movement of the Pope's lips appears to match the audio, and there are no visual inconsistencies in his appearance, which can be signs that a video has been altered using AI.
However, the pontiff appears to mispronounce Traore’s name in different ways in quick succession, calling him “President Trayas” at 2’33” in the video and “President Trayor” four seconds later – an unlikely occurrence if he delivered the speech.
The English transcript (in red bold letters) partially obscures a line of French text, which indicates that the pope originally delivered an address at the Salle Paul VI audience hall at the Vatican (archived here).
A reverse image search using keyframes extracted from the video further shows that the original clip was from a press conference held on May 12, 2025, when the pope called for the release of imprisoned journalists and urged the world to “avoid the paradigm of war” (archived here).
The pope addressed journalists in Italian, not English, as portrayed in the altered clip.
The altered clip was also posted on YouTube by Pan African Dreams, a channel that regularly publishes content about Traore.
This was on May 17, 2025 – days before it circulated elsewhere on social media – and was identified as synthetic content that was digitally generated.
The owners of the YouTube account also included a disclaimer. It reads: “This video is a work of fiction inspired by the life of IBRAHIM TRAORÉ. While some elements are based on real events, the situations and dialogues described are entirely imaginary and do not reflect any actual events”.
An authentic English transcript of the original address published on the Vatican’s website showed that the Pope did not mention Africa or Traore during the entire speech (archived here).
AFP Fact Check extracted the audio from the altered clip and ran it through Loccus.ai – an audio tool that looks for specific forensic traces left by voice generators.
The result showed a 99 percent probability that the audio was generated with an AI tool.
The Vatican media department has also denied that the Pope received a letter from Burkina Faso or delivered a public address responding to Traore (archived here).
Traore became Burkina Faso’s military leader after a coup in September 2022 amid growing anti-French sentiment in the Sahel region (archived here).
He is a frequent topic of viral social media posts in which supporters cast him in a positive light, but observers say his online rise has been accompanied by a flood of misleading and false claims.
More AFP fact-checks related to artificial intelligence can be found here.
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