The Deepfakes Analysis Unit (DAU) analysed a video that apparently shows Adm. Dinesh Kumar Tripathi, India’s Chief of Naval Staff, supposedly blaming the Indian government for losses suffered by the Indian Air Force during the recent India-Pakistan military escalation. After putting the video through A.I. detection tools and getting our expert partners to weigh in, we were able to conclude that an A.I.-generated audio clip was spliced with real audio to manipulate the video.
The 24-second video in Hindi was escalated to the DAU by a fact-checking partner for analysis. It was posted from several accounts on X, formerly Twitter, although with different accompanying text.
One such account with the display name of “Congress in UP” posted the video on Aug. 28. The display picture of the account resembles the official symbol of the Indian National Congress (INC) party —the hand. The profile details indicate that the account was created in March 2018 and is associated with a “non-governmental and non-profit organisation”; the official INC website has been linked to it. Indianapolis, a city in United States’ Indiana state, is displayed as the location in the profile details.
The text with the video, in English, reads: “Indian Chief of Naval Staff Admiral Dinesh Kumar Tripathi blames the Modi Government for not giving them permission to inflict any damage due to political reasons, which resulted as heavy losses for the Indian Air Force. #OperationSindoor”.
We do not have any evidence to suggest if the video originated from any of the accounts on X or elsewhere.
The fact-checking unit of the Press Information Bureau (PIB), which debunks misinformation related to the Indian government, recently posted a fact-check from their verified handle on X, debunking the video attributed to Admiral Tripathi.
The admiral is captured in a medium close-up in the video. He appears to be standing at a podium, addressing an audience as a microphone is placed in front of him. His head moves in an animated manner and his gaze shifts in different directions. The video ends abruptly with his eyes appearing shut.
His backdrop is primarily white with some orangish vertical lines. A logo resembling that of The Print, an Indian digital news publication, is visible in the top left corner of the video frame. The logo covers an image of an insignia with symbols in yellow set against a blue backdrop.
The video quality is poor, however, one can discern that there is barely much synchronisation between the audio track and the admiral’s lip movements. His mouth appears to move in a puppet-like manner. His teeth resemble a white patch in some frames, the lower set in particular seems to lack definition. The shape of his chin distorts, with an unnatural protrusion visible in some frames.
The insignia on the admiral’s cap is unidentifiable and changes shape throughout the video. The gorget or the decorative collar patch on his uniform changes shape as well while the epaulettes appear garbled. An object resembling a button can be seen on his collar in some frames with a tattered seam running below it. We also noticed that the edges of the podium change shape at various points in the video track.
All the visual oddities highlighted above point to signs of possible digital manipulation in the video.
On comparing the voice attributed to the admiral in the video with his recorded speeches available online, similarities can be established in the voice, accent, and diction but only for the first 14-seconds of the audio track. For the last 10-seconds of the audio track the voice sounds monotonous and lacks the cadence of human speech. His delivery is slower in the recorded videos.
We undertook a reverse image search using screenshots from the video and traced the admiral’s clip to this video published on Aug. 26, 2025 from the official YouTube channel of The Print. The video is mostly in Hindi with a few English words in the beginning.
The admiral’s backdrop is identical in the video under review and the one we traced. However, the details on his uniform are not an exact match in the two videos. The epaulettes, gorget, insignia on his cap are discernible in the video we traced and match the official regalia of an Indian naval admiral.
The button-like object on his collar and the tear in the seam below it, do not appear in the video we traced. Instead his uniform has golden buttons with one of them looped to the aiguillette.
The first 14 seconds of audio heard in the doctored video have been lifted as is from the video we traced. The subsequent 10-second audio segment, which has a different voice as we pointed above, is nowhere to be found in the source video.
On comparing the video tracks of the segments that have an identical audio track in the manipulated as well as the source video, we observed that the admiral’s body language and gestures in both the tracks were completely different. Despite this, the manipulated video shows no visible jump cuts or transitions and looks fairly seamless.
The source video also features other subjects who are not part of the doctored video. It appears that a short clip of the admiral has been lifted from the source video and used to create the doctored video.
The logo of The Print appears like a flash in the middle of the screen for a second in the source video and then stays at the top-left corner of the video frame throughout. We noticed that the logo in the doctored video has a dotted “i”, which is not the case in the original logo.
An image of the Indian Navy’s Crest is visible in the top-left corner of the frame in the source video for a split second, barring which, it remains obscured by The Print’s logo. The admiral’s name and designation are also displayed through text graphics at the bottom of that video; these details are absent from the doctored video.
The podium does not undergo any distortion in the source video, unlike the doctored video.
The video being addressed through this report is similar to several videos that the DAU has debunked in the wake of the recent military escalations between India and Pakistan. These manipulated videos have typically been created by splicing A.I.-generated audio with original audio and video tracks of top Indian military officials and ministers of the Indian government to peddle a false narrative.
Shared below is a table that compares the English translation of the audio track from the doctored video with a segment of the audio track from the original video featuring the admiral. We want to give our readers a sense of how similar the audio tracks are and how that can be misleading. We, of course, do not intend to give any oxygen to the bad actors behind this content.
To discern the extent of A.I. manipulation in the video under review, we put it through A.I. detection tools.
The voice tool of Hiya, a company that specialises in artificial intelligence solutions for voice safety, indicated that there is an 86 percent probability of the audio track in the video having been generated or modified using A.I.
Hive AI’s deepfake video detection tool did not indicate A.I.-manipulation in the video track. However, their audio detection tool highlighted that except for the first 10-seconds, the entire audio track used in the video is A.I.-generated.
We also ran the audio track through the A.I. speech classifier of ElevenLabs, a company specialising in voice A.I. research and deployment. The results that returned indicated that there is a 54 percent probability that the audio track in the video was generated using their platform; the result was classified as “uncertain”.
When we reached out to ElevenLabs for a comment on the analysis, they told us that they conducted a thorough technical analysis but were unable to conclusively determine that the reported synthetic audio originated from their platform.
To get expert analysis on the video we reached out to our partners at RIT’s DeFake Project. Saniat Sohrawardi and Kelly Wu from the project noted that the video has several signs of fakeness. Referring to the audio track used in the video, they confirmed our observations about the audio sounding different 14-seconds onwards, stating that the audio in the second half suddenly becomes very robotic and flat.
Pointing to the source video, we shared above, they noted that it has two microphones while the doctored video only has one. They also corroborated our observations about the doctored video with regard to the change in shape of the podium and the stars on the admiral’s collar.
Akib Shahriyar from the project stated that the video looks like a case of image-to-video (I2V) or audio-driven avatar generation and not text-to-video. Mr. Shahriyar noted that the video creator perhaps grabbed a clean frame from the source video, removed the graphics visible on the screen, and then re-animated the face and lips of the subject to a new audio track using an avatar model.
Referencing the observations of his team members he added that morphing insignia, shifting podium edges, the missing microphone, and the changed audio quality in the latter part of the video are typical image-to-video and text-to-speech fingerprints.
Shahriyar shared that the doctored video could possibly have been generated using tools such as StableAvatar, MultiTalk. He added that lip-sync models are able to match phonemes reasonably but distort edge details that are reflected through the podium and collar melting in case of this video.
He pointed out that in one instance in the doctored video, the admiral’s uniform folds weirdly at the exact same location where a text graphic appears in the source video. This, he states, adds to the issue of “maintaining global consistent geometry” seen in the models used for creating such videos.
On the basis of our observations and expert analyses, we can conclude that an A.I.-generated audio clip was inserted in the real audio track of the admiral and used with his visuals to peddle a false narrative about the Indian Air Force having suffered losses in the recent India-Pakistan conflict.
(Written by Debraj Sarkar and Debopriya Bhattacharya, edited by Pamposh Raina.)
Kindly Note: The manipulated audio/video files that we receive on our tipline are not embedded in our assessment reports because we do not intend to contribute to their virality.
You can read below the fact-checks related to this piece published by our partners:
Fact Check: Viral Video Of Navy Chief Accusing Government Of Inaction Is A Deepfake
Video Of Indian Navy Chief Blaming Govt For Op Sindoor Is A Deepfake
AI-Manipulated Clip Shared to Falsely Claim It Shows CNS Tripathi Blaming Govt
