Lighthouse Journalism found a few videos featuring, author, philanthropist Sudha Murthy and her husband, co-founder of Infosys, Narayana Murthy. In these videos, both were seen endorsing an investment scheme.
During the investigation, we found that the videos are fake and they did not encourage people to invest a minimum of Rs 21,000 to gain more returns.
Claim:
Facebook user Aviator Osman shared the viral post on Facebook.
Sudha Murthy was heard encouraging people to invest in a scheme by registering on the given link.
Facebook user Yann Kumwamba also shared a similar video featuring Narayna Murthy.
This video was shared along with the logo of India Today and featured eminent journalists.
Investigation:
We started the investigation by running a reverse image search on the keyframes obtained from the video.
The keyframes did not yield many results, hence we just ran a Google keyword search, ‘Sudha Murthy in a white saree’, as seen in the video.
This led us to a video on YouTube, which had similar visuals to the viral video.
Here she was speaking about sarees, and not about investment schemes.
We found similar visuals in another video shared on YouTube. The keyframes were similar and here she was speaking about, what made her change herself. The video was uploaded in 2021.
There were similar videos available on YouTube, but in none of these videos, she was seen endorsing a scheme.
We converted this video to audio and then ran it through an AI voice detector embedded in the InVid tool called Hiya.
The tool detected that the audio was AI-generated.
We ran the audio obtained from the video through the Hiya AI voice detector embedded in the InVid tool. This suggested that the voice was AI-generated.
The Google reverse image search on keyframes did not yield much results, so we contacted senior journalist Rajdeep Sardesai.
Talking to the Lighthouse Journalism Rajdeep Sardesai clarified that the video was completely fake and he did not have a conversation with Narayana Murthy on the investment schemes. He said he had interviewed Narayana Murthy after the passing of the chairperson of the Tata group, Ratan Tata.
Conclusion: Viral videos featuring philanthropist Sudha Murthy and Infosys co-founder Narayan Murthy, endorsing an investment scheme are fake. Both these videos have been generated using AI tools.
