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On Tikkok I saw a video of a rave on a high -rise building, while rockets fly in the background. Can that be real? While I try to research if I just saw a AI video or this party was real on a roof-and if so where it wants it-the video has already disappeared. Find difficult in the shallows of the Internet.
A few hours later, a friend sends me a video of dancing people in Tehran who supposedly celebrate the bombs. However, it sees me a suspiciously similar to an Iranian New Year’s celebration with music and fire about which you jump. A few days later, an Israeli peace activist posts a video of a family that is pleased that an Iranian rocket crashes over a Palestinian village. My head smokes. What is real? What is fake? And can we somehow distinguish all of this?
War between Iran and Israel
The war between Israel and Iran is also a war of pictures-or above all: the AI pictures. In the meantime, the Internet has been switched off in Iran, people no longer have access to information. But before that happened, friends sent us: inside pixelated videos that circulate there in chat groups and show an allegedly destroyed Tel Aviv. The videos all show a completely different picture than we know from our news reports here, from media such as Tagesschau, New York Times and Haaretz. They all look like the AI generated, the parts of the building lying around do not result in a conclusive whole, the people walking around seem to run like concrete.
And it would not be a surprise, because even the official news in official Iranian media show AI-generated videos, as research by the British BBC: A video in which a rocket hits a building and explodes immediately, is disturbing at first glance and looks real. Until you make sure that the alleged rockets appear out of nowhere, the building explodes as in a bad Steven-Segal action film and the smoke pulls down instead of up. And the video of the supposedly celebrating people in Tehran has also made the British broadcaster: A picture search on Google immediately shows that the video was actually recorded in March at New Year’s celebrations on the streets of the city of the million.
What else can you believe?
Already now that image and video sterilizers are still quite nonsense in their photos and videos and at second glance they can be exposed as fakes at second glance, such videos go viral. This is because nobody takes time for second glance. Such surreal pictures seem to take any critical look and doubts.
And it is not as if there are not enough real surreal photos and videos, from the war of last week, from the last 19 months, from October 7, from all wars of the present. I have the video of the rave on the roof, while rockets hunt over the sky. This does not mean that it was absolutely a fake – I couldn’t even check it – but rather that we live in times when we are flooded by more content every second than we could ever consume it. And that we live in a time of simultaneities when it is not unrealistic that people still danced at a party while a war breaks out. Because people in war and crisis regions also do one thing above all: over- and on.
So what can we do in this war of fake and real pictures? Take a deep breath. Take a closer look at videos and photos. Subscribe to fact finders – and always remember that no matter whether this picture is real or fake, always suffer real people from a war and not mere numbers.