00:03Welcome to Euronews fact-checking show, The Cube.
00:06At first glance, this picture appears to show Russian President Vladimir Putin
00:11taking a group selfie with a group of world leaders.
00:15It was first shared on the verified ex-account of the Russian Embassy in South Africa
00:20during September's BRICS summit, alongside the caption,
00:24BRICS is a superpower.
00:26It gathered more than 2 million views, but it's not real.
00:31We know this because no credible news organization published this image as real.
00:36The Cube team has also run it through image detectors, which revealed it to be AI-generated.
00:42It's becoming increasingly common for European politicians
00:45to publish AI-generated images without labeling them as such.
00:50Recently, the president of the Portuguese far-right party, Chega, posted an AI-generated video
00:56of a woman with six fingers.
00:58It even spreads beyond Europe, with high-profile figures such as US President Donald Trump
01:04using more and more AI-generated images and videos in their communications.
01:10A 2026 study that analyzed this phenomenon during the French municipal elections
01:15found that EU's remains most pronounced among right and far-right parties
01:20and that the lack of disclosure could put public trust in the electoral process in danger.
01:26Most of the material looked at by researchers carried no explicit AI disclaimer,
01:30even when watermarks were present.
01:33Since August of this year, the EU's AI Act has generally required realistic AI-generated
01:40or manipulated material to be clearly disclosed as such.
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