AI-generated Iran war videos surge as creators use new tech to cash in

BBC

An unprecedented wave of AI-generated misinformation about the US-Israel war with Iran is being monetised by online creators with growing access to generative AI technology, experts have told BBC Verify.

Our analysis has found numerous examples of AI-generated videos and fabricated satellite imagery being used to make false and misleading claims about the conflict, which have collectively amassed hundreds of millions of views online.

"The scale is truly alarming and this war has made it impossible to ignore now," says Timothy Graham, a digital media expert at the Queensland University of Technology.

"What used to require professional video production can now be done in minutes with AI tools. The barrier to creating convincing synthetic conflict footage has essentially collapsed," he says.

The US and Israel began launching strikes on Iran on 28 February. In response, Iran has launched drone and missile attacks on Israel, as well as multiple Gulf nations and US military assets in the region.

Many have turned to social media to search for and share the latest information and to help make sense of a fast-moving week of conflict.

The platform X announced this week that it will temporarily suspend creators from its monetisation programme if they post AI-generated videos of armed conflict without a label.

The scheme rewards eligible users whose posts create large numbers of views, likes, shares and comments with payments from the platform.

"It's a notable signal that they've noticed that this is a big problem," says Mahsa Alimardani, a researcher specialising in Iran at the Oxford Internet Institute.

We asked TikTok and Meta, the company of Facebook and Instagram, if they intend to take similar action, but they did not respond to our requests for comment.

A typical example of an AI-generated video that BBC Verify has tracked shows missiles striking the city of Tel Aviv, Israel, as explosions ring out in the background.

Detrimental impact

Some X users turned to the platform's AI chatbot, Grok, to verify the video's authenticity. But in many cases seen by BBC Verify, Grok wrongly insisted that the AI-generated video was real.

Another fake video, viewed tens of millions of times, claims to show Dubai's Burj Khalifa skyscraper in flames, with a crowd of people running towards it.

This AI-generated footage spread widely online at a time of considerable concern from residents and tourists about the drone and missile strikes on the city.

"Fake videos like these have a detrimental impact on people's trust in the verified information they see online and make it much harder to document real evidence," says Alimardani.

We verified multiple real videos showing Iranian drone and missile strikes on the US Navy's Fifth Fleet headquarters in Bahrain on the first day of the conflict.

A fabricated photo, shared on X by the state-linked newspaper The Tehran Times, began to spread the following day and claimed to show extensive damage to the base.

The fake appears to be based on real satellite imagery of a US naval base in Bahrain taken in February 2025, which is publicly available online.

According to Google's SynthID watermark detector, the fake image was generated or edited with a Google AI tool.

Three vehicles parked outside are also in the same spot in both the genuine satellite imagery and the AI picture, despite the photos allegedly having been taken a year apart.

Google's AI tools, including its video generator Veo, are on the growing list of popular AI platforms, alongside OpenAI's Sora model, the Chinese AI app Seedance, and Grok, which is built into X.

"The number of different tools that are now available to create a wide range of highly realistic AI manipulations is unprecedented," says Henry Ajder, a generative AI expert.

"We have never seen these tools so available, so easy and so cheap to use," he says.

This has led to a surge of AI-generated content online "because the pipeline onto social media can now be almost fully automated," says Victoire Rio, executive director of the technology policy non-profit What To Fix.