The Deepfakes Analysis Unit analysed a video that apparently shows Anant Ambani, non-executive director of Reliance Industries and their philanthropic arm, promoting a supposed new gaming app called “AVI by Ambani” which promises high monetary returns. After putting the video through A.I. detection tools and getting our expert partners to weigh in, we were able to conclude that synthetic audio was used to fabricate the video.
The video in Hindi, embedded in a Facebook post, was sent to the DAU tipline for assessment. The video is 10-minutes-and-21-seconds long, though, it has only 49-seconds of audio-visual content followed by a series of static scenic images. It was uploaded on March 7, 2025 and has since garnered more than 1.5 million views.
The account which posted the video uses the name of former Brazilian footballer Rodrigo Taddei and carries his photo as the display picture. It also has a blue tick, usually seen with Meta-authenticated accounts and has 146,000 followers. The profile details suggest that the account belongs to a “digital creator” and “sportsperson”, however, for some users the description reads “athlete” instead of “sportsperson”. We don’t have any evidence to suggest whether this suspicious video originated from this account or from another account.
The video has been packaged like a news clip that shows Mr. Ambani addressing a press conference. Microphones bearing logos of different media houses can be seen placed in front of him. It appears that he is not looking into the camera and is instead focusing on something or someone else. In some frames the words “Vantara” are clearly visible in the backdrop.
In the top left corner of the video frame a logo that reads “btTV” is visible, it resembles the logo of Business Today TV, which is part of Business Today, a business news outlet. Text graphics in Hindi at the bottom of the video frame mention his full name and below that a caption, also in Hindi, reads: “now the app is available for everyone.”
A male voice recorded over Ambani’s video track claims that every week up to a certain sum of money can be made through the supposed gaming app, however, the specific figure mentioned is unclear. It claims that the game is so simple that even a “child can play” as it only requires one to “launch a plane and as long as it is allowed to fly, income will keep increasing.”
The video ends with the voice luring the viewers with a “special bonus”, a “gift for Indian citizens”, if they click on a link below the video to download the supposed app and start playing with a small amount of “300-400 rupees”. The link is not visible anywhere.
The voice attributed to Ambani bears similarity to his natural voice, however, in between sentences a peculiar sound can be heard, which seems to mimic the natural human breathing sound. The voice sounds rushed and there is no change in the tone or pitch. The overall delivery is scripted and robotic when compared with his recorded interviews and speeches.
The video framing alternates between a medium shot and a medium close-up, with Ambani’s face, especially his mouth, being clearly visible in both. Though his lip movements appear to be in sync with the accompanying audio his upper lip seems static, which is especially visible in close-ups.
We undertook a reverse image search using screenshots from the video and traced the clips to this video published on Feb. 26, 2024 from the official YouTube channel of Business Today. There is no mention of any gaming app in this video. Instead Ambani is addressing a press conference about Vantara, a large animal rescue and conservation centre in Gujarat, set up under his leadership and inaugurated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi earlier this month.
The clothes and backdrop of Ambani in the manipulated video and the one we traced are identical. The original video is in English not Hindi; it has text graphics in English with his name and designation, and the Business Today TV logo on the top left corner of the video frame.
Ambani’s facial movements are more pronounced in the original video compared to the manipulated video, especially the movement of his eyebrows. His face has a certain shine and his beard looks more smoothened in the doctored video, which could be a result of the digital manipulation.
This is not the first time that original videos featuring Ambani have been manipulated using synthetic audio to falsely link him to suspicious gaming apps. The DAU noticed an uptick in such videos around the time of his wedding in July. The clip from the press conference, which has been used in the video that we are addressing through this report, was also used in one of the videos we debunked in July.
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 a 76 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 any manipulation in the video track. However, their audio detection tool highlighted A.I. manipulation in the entire audio track used in the video.
For a further analysis on the audio track from the video we put it through the A.I. speech classifier of ElevenLabs, a company specialising in voice A.I. research and deployment. The classifier returned results as “very likely”, indicating that there’s a high probability that the audio track in the video was generated using their software.
For expert analysis, we escalated the video to our detection partner ConTrailsAI, a Bangalore-based startup with its own A.I. tools for detection of audio and video spoofs.
The team ran the video through audio as well as video detection models, the results that returned indicated high confidence for A.I. manipulation in the audio track.
In their report, the team pointed out various timestamps in the audio track, noting the presence of a distinct silence, which sounded unnatural with respect to the rest of the voice track. This, according to them, indicated likely manipulation in the audio track.
For the video track analysis, the team noted that their model predicted A.I.-manipulation around some of the timestamps where the odd silence was noticed in the audio track. They added that the audio track is used as an input for any lip-sync model that’s why the inconsistencies in the lip-sync were picked up by their tool around those specific moments. However, the rest of the video was detected to be real, which they said is a false prediction.
They indicated that the likely cause of the unconvincing result for the video track is the use of advanced and latest lip-sync method, which makes the video look very realistic.
To get another expert to weigh in on the video, we escalated it to our partner GetRealLabs, co-founded by Dr. Hany Farid and his team, they specialise in digital forensics and A.I. detection.
The team said that there is evidence suggesting that the video contains synthetic, A.I.-generated material. They used multiple analysis techniques which indicated that the audio track has been synthesised and that the mouth movements are not natural. They noted a lack of filler words in the subject’s monologue, which is unusual and points toward audio created via text-to-speech rather than normal speech patterns. They added that it was very likely that the subject’s voice was created using ElevenLabs.
They observed that the video purports to be a news report but the bottom banner stays the same for the duration of the video. They pointed to the presence of the Vantara logo in the background, which they deem to be a contextual inconsistency, citing that it is unrelated to the topic discussed in the video.
Their remarks about the presence of a sequence of A.I.-generated landscape images toward the end of the video corroborated our own observations on the same. They speculated that presence of the images and the duration of the video exceeding 10 minutes may be an attempt to bypass content moderation filters.
On the basis of our findings and analysis from experts, we can conclude that original footage of Ambani was manipulated with synthetic audio to peddle a dubious gaming app in a bid to scam the public.
(Written by Debraj Sarkar and Debopriya Bhattacharya, edited by Pamposh Raina.)
Kindly Note: The manipulated video/audio files that we receive on our tipline are not embedded in our assessment reports because we do not intend to contribute to their virality.
