Bill Gates praises Imran Khan in a video

Rating Justification

The iVerify Pakistan team has investigated the claim and determined that it is false.

To reach this conclusion, the iVerify Pakistan team analysed the video.

Multiple posts on the social media platform X on July 28, 2024, claimed that Microsoft founder Bill Gates praised PTI founder Imran Khan in a video. However, the video was found to be AI-generated.

Imran has been imprisoned in Adiala Jail for over a year. His sentences in the previous two Toshakhana cases were suspended, and he was acquitted in the cipher and iddat cases, but he has since been charged in a third Toshakhana case.

HOW IT STARTED

On July 28, 2024, a user on X, who appears to be a PTI supporter based on their past posts, shared a video of Bill Gates in which he is seen praising Imran Khan.

The post’s caption said: “Bill Gates, who is the owner of Samsung and Microsoft, is saying that Imran Khan is the best leader. When Imran Khan comes out of jail, I will go to meet him because Imran Khan is not a thief like others. This is respect.”

The post received more than 157,000 views.

The same video was widely shared by others as can be seen here, here and here with over 12,000 combined views.

METHODOLOGY

A fact check was initiated to determine the veracity of the claim due to its virality and keen public interest in the former prime minister and the Microsoft founder.

Investigating the video showed the audio to be out of sync with distortion effects around the glasses and lips, a visual element found in poorly generated AI deepfakes.

A reverse image search yielded a YouTube video of an interview dated back to April 2020 that Gates gave to CBS programme ‘This Morning’.

Gates was wearing the same clothes in the interview as in the viral video with the bookshelf behind him also being the same.

Gates’s voice was a clone from Parrot, the AI voice generation application. One can select his voice and insert the desired text and it will generate text-to-speech in the Microsoft founder’s voice.

Contacted for comment, Affan Ahmed Khan, digital manager for Dawn News and a video editor, said: “These free AI-dubbed videos are always low quality because, for the full version, you need to pay, which is why we always see a few seconds of the clip and very low quality.”

He further added, “If you try the lip reading technique closely, his voice will not match his lips.”

FACT-CHECK STATUS: FALSE

The claim that a viral video shows Bill Gates praising Imran Khan is false.

The video is AI-generated with a fake voiceover with substantial distortion present.

Evidence and References

Bill Gates’s interview, CBS ‘This Morning’, April 2, 2020:
https://web.archive.org/web/20200413184713/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4X-KkQeMMSQ