Image credit: Matt Novack
A video showing Darth Vader speaking at a San Diego Public Safety Committee meeting is fooling news outlets across the country. It isn't real.
The clip shows a costumed Darth Vader telling committee members he supports Flock Safety's cameras, the controversial license plate reading cameras that police departments use to track vehicles. Flock's cameras have been sparking privacy debates in cities nationwide, with many jurisdictions electing to ban their use. But it should be no surprise that this type of technology would appeal to a leader of the authoritarian Empire for rooting out “rebel scum.”
In the fake video, Vader says "the emperor is a fan of Flock" and jokes that the cameras would help track those pernicious rebels from “playground to pool.”
404 Media and Gizmodo reported the video early in the afternoon on August 20. Fox News, UPI, CNN, The Hill, and dozens of other outlets picked up the story over the next day.
The City of San Diego's official recording of the meeting tells a different story. Techlicious checked the viral clip against San Diego's public meeting archive, which anyone can watch for free online. The comparison shows the fake video clearly doesn't reflect what actually occurred.
In the real meeting, a committee member calls for a public speaker named Darth Vader to come forward. Nobody does, and the meeting quickly moves on to the next speaker.
Image credit: City of San Diego
With the fake clip below, Vader is shown waiting to take the mic, along with supporting audience members. None of these people are present in the real city recording. The chiron has also been changed to read "Non-Agenda" Public Comment. If you're into puzzle games, you can see numerous other artifacts from what is presumably an AI transformation.
Image credit: @Matt Novak/YouTube
When you see this video shared online, enjoy it for what it is: a clever joke, not real news. And if a viral clip ever seems too good, or too strange, to be true, checking the original source is often just a search away. As AI has continued to improve, even journalists, such as ourselves, are at risk of being taken in by stories that are just too good to resist.
