As federal immigration enforcement activity tied to Operation Metro Surge has unfolded in Minneapolis, social media has been flooded with a mix of real on-the-ground footage and highly realistic AI-generated images and videos.
Unfortunately, it’s getting increasingly difficult to tell what actually happened from what was fabricated in an AI video generation tool, which just about anyone can do with platforms like Grok, Veo 3.2 and Sora.
I'll admit, even I've shared videos that I thought were real. It can be very hard to tell, which is why researchers and fact-checkers have warned that convincing deepfakes tied to these events are spreading rapidly across platforms like X, TikTok and Facebook — sometimes racking up millions of views before being debunked.
