At the turn of February-March 2025, a video went viral on the Internet in which portraits of the President of Ukraine in a prison uniform, created by Elon Musk’s neural network, were allegedly shown in the main square of New York. We checked whether this video is true.
On February 28, 2025, a video began to circulate on Telegram channels showing a digital billboard in Times Square. The billboard, in turn, shows a series of images of Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky in a prison uniform and in corresponding interiors - from a cell to a courtroom. The pictures were allegedly generated by the request “future of Zelensky” by the Grok neural network, which belongs to Elon Musk, a close ally of US President Donald Trump. The logo of The New York Times newspaper is visible in the upper right corner of the video.
This news was shared Lenta.ru, Ura.ru, News.ru, "Vesti.ru», "Military Review", "Pravda.ru"and other Russian media. According to the TGStat service, publications on this topic on Telegram have collected almost 3 million views at the time of writing this analysis. Among the most popular are posts in channels “Technomotel"(290,000 views), "Evil proof️" (250,000), "Colonelcassad" (205,000) and "#Montan!"(201,000). In addition, the video was distributed on platforms “VKontakte", "Peekaboo", "Classmates", Facebook And X.
February 28 Zelensky arrived to Washington for talks with Trump about access USA to Ukrainian natural resources, including rare earth metals. As many Telegram channels claimed, it was on the day of the Ukrainian president’s visit to the White House that ended scandal, images generated by Grok were shown in Times Square.
The 20-second video shows a digital billboard in Times Square displaying the query string Grok — a chatbot based on artificial intelligence developed by Elon Musk’s xAI company. In the video, the prompt “Grok, generate an image that predicts the future of Zelensky” is entered into the line. In response, the neural network provides a slide show of five images it created of the Ukrainian president in a prison uniform in the dock, in a cell and behind bars. The video ends with an animation of the logo and the tagline “Grok knows best.” One might assume that this is the slogan of an advertising campaign for a neural network, but a Google search for this phrase did not yield any results.
The New York Times logo is visible in the upper right corner of the viral video. "Verified" could not find this video on any website publication, nor in its official accounts in YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, X And Instagram. This newspaper, as well as other large and reputable American media outlets, did not report on the Grok advertisement with Zelensky in a prison uniform.
A reverse search of the video frames showed that the screen on which this advertisement was supposedly shown was indeed posted in Times Square, one of the most visited places in New York. Although tens of thousands of people pass by this billboard every day, Verified was unable to find video recordings of the same advertisement from a different angle or at a different time of day. Spanish TV channel RTVE I also studied recordings from 24-hour surveillance cameras in Times Square for February 28, when this video was allegedly shown in the square, and did not find any footage of Zelensky.
Apparently, a video with the Grok interface was superimposed on the authentic video of the Times Square billboard, as well as the logo of The New York Times, which was supposed to add credibility to the fake. This is not the first time that such a scheme has been used by the creators of fake videos, which Verified has analyzed more than once. Many similar news stories were dedicated specifically to the screens in Times Square: they supposedly celebrated decade of the annexation of Crimea, advertised contract service in Tatarstan and humiliated Zelensky.
As for the chatbot Grok, "Verified" tested its operation. We entered exactly the same prompt with a request to generate an image that would show Zelensky's future, and repeated this experiment four times. For each request, the neural network returned two portraits, slightly different from each other, but none of them even remotely resembled those shown in the viral video.
The earliest publication that contains a viral video and which was discovered by “Verified” appeared on February 28 at 13:44 Moscow time in the Telegram channel “Avdeevka.ru"(6600 views), and then began to actively spread on other Russian resources.
Thus, the video about the Grok advertisement with the image of Zelensky in a prison uniform in Times Square is a fake, created, apparently, using editing.
Cover photo: social networks
Read on topic:
- "Mirror of the week" ZN.UA asked Grok 3 about the clash between Trump and Zelensky: AI Mask showed where there was manipulation, pressure and playing on emotions
- Meduza. Neural networks can fight—and kill
- Putin on his knee, the Pope's down jacket and Trump's arrest: how to recognize viral photos created by neural networks.
- Is it true that an advertisement for a program appeared in Times Square with the headline “It’s All Over with Kiev”?
- False authorities. How the BBC became the brand of choice for fake video creators
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