AI War Footage Provenance Claims

Introduction

Since the outbreak of large-scale conflict in Ukraine in February 2022 and the escalation of fighting in Gaza beginning in October 2023, the provenance of war footage has become one of the most contested domains in contemporary information warfare. Researchers, journalists, and governments face simultaneous challenges: the proliferation of genuine documentation from ubiquitous smartphones, the deliberate publication of misleading or decontextualized footage by state and non-state actors, and the increasing difficulty of distinguishing authentic footage from AI-generated or digitally manipulated material.

Ongoing investigations by Bellingcat, the BBC's Verify unit, ProPublica's Tracking Ukraine project, the New York Times Visual Investigations team, and academic researchers have advanced the state of the art in video forensics — but even specialist teams routinely encounter footage whose provenance cannot be definitively established in real time.

The Documented Challenge

Volume overwhelms verification capacity. In the first months of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, researchers estimated that tens of thousands of new pieces of conflict footage were being posted daily across Telegram, Twitter, TikTok, and other platforms. Existing open-source intelligence (OSINT) teams — Bellingcat, the Centre for Information Resilience, and others — are staffed in the dozens, not thousands. Verification is inherently incomplete.

Miscontextualization is the dominant form of disinformation. The majority of provenance-disputed footage examined by fact-checkers involves real footage attributed to the wrong event, location, or actor — not AI-generated fabrications. Reverse-video search tools, geolocation through visible landmarks, and shadow analysis have allowed researchers to resolve hundreds of misattributions. The BBC, AP, and Reuters have published detailed methodological guides.

AI-generated footage is emerging but remains a small fraction. While AI-generated synthetic video (deepfakes) has been used in conflict information operations — notably a poorly executed 2022 deepfake of Ukrainian President Zelensky urging surrender, quickly identified by metadata and visual artifacts — the technical quality required to produce convincing combat footage at scale has not yet made this the dominant form of manipulation. Independent researchers including those at the Citizen Lab and MIT Media Lab note that authentic footage remains far easier and faster to manipulate through selective editing and miscontextualization than to fabricate wholesale.

State actors deliberately exploit provenance ambiguity. Russia's Ministry of Defense and affiliated Telegram channels have systematically published footage with false attributions. The Ukrainian government has done the same in specific documented cases, according to independent assessments by the UN Commission on Human Rights in Ukraine and independent researchers. Both sides' information operations exploit the genuine difficulty of real-time verification.

Ongoing Investigations

Several major provenance questions in the Ukraine and Gaza conflicts remain under active investigation as of 2025–2026:

• Al-Ahli Hospital explosion (October 2023, Gaza): Within hours of the explosion, attribution was disputed between Palestinian officials blaming Israel and Israeli and U.S. intelligence asserting a misfired Palestinian rocket. Multiple independent investigations — by the NYT Visual Investigations team, AP, BBC, and Human Rights Watch — produced assessments ranging from "consistent with a misfired rocket" to "inconclusive." The event illustrates that even well-resourced forensic teams can reach different provisional conclusions from the same visual evidence under time pressure.
• Various Bucha imagery (March–April 2022): Russian government officials claimed Bucha footage was staged. Satellite imagery from Maxar Technologies, timeline analysis from the NYT, and independent OSINT teams confirmed bodies had been present on Bucha streets for days before Russian withdrawal — a strong rebuttal of the staging claim. However, independent satellite imagery access is not available for all conflict claims.

The Epistemic Problem

The genuine difficulty of war footage provenance creates a predictable exploitation pattern: actors with incentives to dispute authentic atrocity documentation can introduce uncertainty in public discourse by pointing to acknowledged verification limitations, even when specific footage has been verified. The existence of some genuinely unresolved cases does not invalidate footage whose provenance has been established.

Conversely, official attribution of footage to specific actors by governments with strategic interests in the outcome should be treated as one input among several in provenance assessment, not definitive confirmation.

What Responsible Verification Looks Like

Established open-source investigation methodology includes:

• Geolocation: Matching visible landmarks, terrain, and infrastructure to satellite imagery using tools including Google Earth, Planet Labs, and Maxar.
• Shadow and lighting analysis: Using solar position calculations to verify claimed time and location of outdoor footage.
• Metadata analysis: Examining EXIF data, upload timestamp sequences, and encoding artifacts.
• Cross-referencing: Matching footage against independently published accounts from multiple sources.
• Reverse-video search: Identifying prior publication of identical or manipulated footage.

Bellingcat, the NYT Visual Investigations team, BBC Verify, and the EU DisinfoLab have published detailed guides to these methods.

Verdict

War footage provenance is a genuine and important area of ongoing investigation, not a settled domain. The claim that all war footage is AI-generated or fabricated is unsupported and contradicted by the substantial volume of footage whose provenance has been established through rigorous open-source methods. The valid concern — that a meaningful fraction of circulating footage is misattributed, selectively edited, or decontextualized, and that real-time verification is impossible at scale — is well-documented. Investigations by established OSINT organizations continue, and provisional conclusions in specific cases should be understood as subject to revision as evidence accumulates.