#FactCheck:AI-generated video falsely shared as thief evading police in Indore

Introduction

In June 2026, Eros Innovation launched Eros Music Worlds, describing itself as the world's first "large cultural music platform". Its first two acts, Jordan and Tanu, are not singers in any conventional sense; they are AI-native personas built from Eros's own film characters, powered by models trained on a licensed corpus of roughly 1.5 trillion cultural tokens drawn from 11,000 films. Alongside them sits a strategic partnership with the family of Mohammed Rafi, the late playback legend, to produce new recordings, a live concert franchise, and a music academy in his name. It's a tidy preview of where AI in music is actually headed: not a novelty generator bolted onto the old industry, but a new kind of media company built around owned IP, licensed data, and characters designed to outlive any single song.

Beyond the demo

The last eighteen months have produced a stream of "firsts". Xania Monet, an AI-voiced R&B act built by Mississippi poet Telisha Jones using Suno, became the first AI artist to chart on a Billboard airplay ranking and was signed by Hallwood Media after a bidding war that reportedly reached $3 million. Breaking Rust, Enlly Blue and Juno Skye followed onto country, rock and Christian charts within weeks. None of this happened in a vacuum: Suno and Udio, the two dominant AI music generators, went from being sued by every major label in mid-2024 to signing licensing settlements with Universal and Warner by late 2025. Voice cloning has run a parallel track from the viral 2023 track "Heart on My Sleeve", which mimicked Drake and The Weeknd without consent, to a wave of Indian cases where AI tools recreated a specific singer's timbre for commercial use. Composition and production tools are now routine studio infrastructure rather than curiosities; the interesting frontier has shifted to multilingual adaptation and catalogue reanimation. Eros has promised 34-language localisation for its AI artists, a scale no dubbing studio could match manually. A related, if less music-specific, signal came from Collective Artists Network's AI-powered Mahabharat: Ek Dharmayudh, produced with Prasar Bharati. AI tools handled pre-visualisation, multi-language dubbing sync and sound design, while composers and voice directors retained control of tone and emotion, a template other Indian studios are likely to copy for scoring and localising large-scale cultural content cheaply.

Where the money actually is?

The commercial case for labels isn't "AI makes music at scale", because scale alone isn't value. Deezer, the only major platform publishing detection data, reported in July 2026 that AI-generated tracks had crossed 50% of daily uploads, around 90,000 tracks a day, up from 10,000 in January 2025. Yet those tracks account for only 1–3% of actual streams, and Deezer flags 85% of that listening as fraudulent bot activity. Generating music has become nearly free; getting anyone to listen hasn't. The real opportunity for rights holders lies elsewhere: licensing catalogues into controlled ecosystems (Universal's 2026 platform with Udio, Warner's deals with both Udio and Suno), reviving legacy artists for new audiences (Eros-Rafi), and using AI for the unglamorous, high-volume work of localisation, sync placement and short-form content that never justified full production budgets before. AI-native performers also travel well into gaming, virtual concerts and brand collaboration formats built for characters rather than people, where a synthetic act never ages, never cancels a tour and can be licensed into a dozen campaigns simultaneously. That is a genuinely new revenue line, but it's a narrow one; it monetises IP ownership, not music generation itself. IFPI's Global Music Report 2026 shows the underlying business is healthy: revenues reached $31.7 billion, up 6.4% — but that growth is still driven overwhelmingly by human catalogues and paid subscriptions, not AI-generated volumes.

The legal fault lines

This is where India's position is genuinely instructive and unresolved. The Copyright Act, 1957, defines the author of a "computer-generated" work as the person who causes it to be created (language added in 1994 for a world of human-directed software, not autonomous generative models), and Indian courts haven't yet settled how far it stretches. What's clearer is the industry's stance on training data: The Indian music industry body, alongside T-Series, Saregama and Sony Music, has sought to join the ANI Media suit against OpenAI in the Delhi High Court, arguing that scraping sound recordings to train models without a licence breaches copyright, a case they say is "crucial for the entire music industry in India, and even worldwide".

Personality rights have moved faster than legislation. In the absence of a dedicated statute, Indian courts have built protection case by case: the Delhi High Court's 2023 order shielding Anil Kapoor's voice and likeness from AI misuse and the Bombay High Court's 2024 ruling in Arijit Singh v Codible Ventures, India's first AI voice-cloning judgement, which granted an injunction spanning every medium, explicitly including the metaverse and generative-AI tools, and rejected fair-use and parody defences outright. Similar orders have since followed for Amitabh Bachchan, Aishwarya Rai Bachchan and others. The pattern mirrors, but predates, statutory responses abroad: Tennessee's 2024 ELVIS Act was the first US law to protect voice explicitly as property, and the federal NO FAKES Act remains pending. The US Copyright Office's January 2025 report reaffirmed that human authorship is the bedrock of copyrightability, denying protection to fully AI-generated output while leaving substantially human-directed hybrid works to case-by-case review. Two regimes are converging on the same instinct that consent and human contribution must anchor ownership through different legal tools: India via judge-made personality rights and the US via statute and Copyright Office guidance.

Who bears the risk?

The disruption isn't evenly spread. Session singers, jingle artists, dubbing performers and early-career composers, the layer of the industry that supplies craft rather than fame, are most exposed since their work is precisely what generative tools now approximate cheaply. A PRS for Music survey of over 2,600 creators found 79% worried about AI competing directly with their output and 76% expecting it to hurt their livelihoods. CISAC has projected AI could erode musicians' incomes by nearly a quarter by 2028. Separately, roughly a fifth of professional voice actors surveyed say they've already lost work to a synthetic voice. For streaming platforms, the risk is structural: as AI supply floods catalogues, royalty pools shared across all streams get diluted, discoverability worsens, and fraud bot streams on AI tracks are designed purely to harvest royalties, which becomes a live threat to the economics everyone else depends on.

Recommendations

None of this points to AI simply replacing musicians, nor to it staying a background production tool. A third category is emerging AI-native "characters" with continuity, backstory and owned IP, closer to franchise properties than bands, which is exactly the model Eros and Hallwood Media are betting on. The deeper shift underneath it is economic: once the marginal cost of producing a new track approaches zero, the constraint on the industry stops being supplied and becomes attention. Whether AI-native artists become a durable category depends on questions still unresolved, training data legality chief among them, and on whether audiences keep listening once the novelty fades. Deezer's own research found 97% of listeners can't reliably distinguish AI from human music, yet 52% still believe fully AI-generated songs shouldn't sit on the same charts as human ones. Provenance matters even when perception can't detect it.

Conclusion

Scarcity in the age of AI will not be creative output but genuine human connection. As AI makes music production abundant and inexpensive, the qualities it cannot replicate authenticity, lived experience, artistic identity, and trust – become increasingly valuable. Audiences will continue to seek creators with compelling stories and meaningful live experiences. In an era of infinite synthetic content, originality is no longer the premium; credibility, human presence, and emotional connection are.

Sources

1. https://www.livemint.com/industry/media/ai-music-ai-native-artists-eros-music-worlds-eros-innovation-copyright-intellectual-property-music-industry-11785053693997.html
2. https://www.facebook.com/KJSIMofficial/posts/the-mint-featured-insights-from-dr-alka-agarwal-assistant-professor-general-mana/1375301184595168/
3. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/livemint_how-ai-brought-the-mahabharat-to-life-collective-activity-7389643662193999873-6BKG
4. https://musically.com/2026/07/02/ai-powered-platform-eros-music-worlds-is-turning-film-characters-into-virtual-singers/
5. https://www.business-standard.com/companies/news/bollywood-t-series-saregama-sony-music-copyright-lawsuit-openai-delhi-hc-125021400876_1.html 

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Introduction

Two videos are being widely circulated on social media with the claim that Chinese troops have entered Arunachal Pradesh, India. The first video shows a large group of soldiers marching in formation, while the second shows armed personnel disembarking from military trucks. Social media users claim that the footage shows Chinese soldiers advancing into Indian territory. CyberPeace Research Wing’s research found the claim to be false. The two viral videos are unrelated to India and actually show Thai Army personnel during military training exercises. Both the Government of India and the Indian Army have also dismissed the claim of any recent Chinese intrusion into Indian territory.

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Claim

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An Instagram user, "mtkv.ideo," shared the viral videos on July 7, 2026, with the caption,"Chinese army has entered 60 km inside India."

https://www.instagram.com/reels/DaehrgExzUl/

https://perma.cc/ZQV9-C6KJ 

Fact Check

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To verify the claim, we extracted several keyframes from the viral videos and conducted a reverse image search using Google Lens.

During the research, we found one of the videos posted on June 16, 2026, on the Facebook page "Liangpha Kha Khaeng."

https://www.facebook.com/reel/992963226961409 

https://perma.cc/6YJB-RT9Z

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According to the information provided with the post, the video shows a training exercise of Non-Commissioned Officers (NCOs) from the 3rd Battalion, 2nd Regiment of the Royal Thai Army. The page also contains several other posts featuring Thai military drills and training activities. We further reviewed the Facebook page and found multiple training videos featuring the same flag carried by soldiers in the viral footage, confirming that the personnel shown belong to the Thai Army, not the Chinese military.

https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61588894033585&locale=hi_IN

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We also found a report published by The Times of India, quoting Union Minister Kiren Rijiju, who dismissed claims of any Chinese intrusion into Arunachal Pradesh. Rijiju clarified that no intrusion had taken place, adding that occasional movement across undemarcated areas occurs because the boundary has not been fully delineated. https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/no-intrusion-transgression-in-absence-of-demarcation-kiran-rijiju/articleshow/132101410.cms

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Conclusion

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Our research found that the viral claim is false. The videos being shared as evidence of Chinese troops entering Arunachal Pradesh actually show Royal Thai Army personnel participating in military training exercises in Thailand. There is no evidence that the footage is related to India or that it depicts any recent Chinese military intrusion into Indian territory. Government officials have also rejected the viral claim.

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One of the best forums for many video producers is YouTube. It also has a great chance of generating huge profits. YouTube content producers need assistance to get the most views, likes, comments, and subscribers for their videos and channels. As a result, some people could use YouTube bots to unnaturally raise their ranks on the YouTube site, which might help them get more organic views and reach a larger audience. However, this strategy is typically seen as unfair and can violate the YouTube platform’s terms of service.

As YouTube grows in popularity, so does the usage of YouTube bots. These bots are software programs that may automate operations on the YouTube platform, such as watching, liking, or disliking videos, subscribing to or unsubscribing from channels, making comments, and adding videos to playlists, among others. There have been YouTube bots around for a while. Many YouTubers widely use these computer codes to increase the number of views on their videos and accounts, which helps them rank higher in YouTube’s algorithm. Researchers discovered a new bot that takes private information from YouTube users’ accounts.

CRIL (Cyble Research and Intelligence Labs) has been monitoring new and active malware families CRIL has discovered a new YouTube bot virus capable of viewing, liking, and commenting on YouTube videos. Furthermore, it is capable of stealing sensitive information from browsers and acting as a bot that accepts orders from the Command and Control (C&C) server to carry out other harmful operations.

The Bot Insight

This YouTube bot has the same capabilities as all other YouTube bots, including the ability to view, like, and comment on videos. Additionally, it has the ability to steal private data from browsers and act as a bot that takes commands from a Command and Control (C&C) server for various malicious purposes. Researchers from Cyble discovered the inner workings of this information breach the Youtube bot uses the sample hash(SHA256) e9dac8b677a670e70919730ee65ab66cc27730378b9233d944ad7879c530d312.They discovered that it was created using the.NET compiler and is an executable file with a 32-bit size.

• The virus runs an AntiVM check as soon as it is executed to thwart researchers’ attempts to find and analyze malware in a virtual environment.
• It stops the execution if it finds that it is operating in a regulated setting. If not, it will carry out the tasks listed in the argument strings.
• Additionally, the virus creates a mutex, copies itself to the %appdata% folder as AvastSecurity.exe, and then uses cmd.exe to run.
• The new mutex makes a task scheduler entry and aids in ensuring
• The victim’s system’s installed Chromium browsers are used to harvest cookies, autofill information, and login information by the AvastSecurity.exe program.
• In order to view the chosen video, the virus runs the YouTube Playwright function, passing the previously indicated arguments along with the browser’s path and cookie data.
• YouTube bot uses the YouTube Playwright function to launch the browser environment with the specified parameters and automate actions like watching, liking, and commenting on YouTube videos. The feature is dependent on Microsoft. playwright’s kit.
• The malware establishes a connection to a C2 server and gets instructions to erase the entry for the scheduled task and end its own process, extract log files to the C2 server, download and run other files, and start/stop watching a YouTube movie.
• Additionally, it verifies that the victim’s PC has the required dependencies, including the Playwright package and the Chrome browser, installed. When it gets the command “view,” it will download and install these dependencies if they are missing.

Recommendations

The following is a list of some of the most critical cybersecurity best practices that serve as the first line of defense against intruders. We propose that our readers follow the advice provided below:

• Downloading pirated software from warez/torrent websites should be avoided. Such a virus is commonly found in “Hack Tools” available on websites such as YouTube, pirate sites, etc.
• When feasible, use strong passwords and impose multi-factor authentication.
• Enable automatic software updates on your laptop, smartphone, and other linked devices.
• Use a reputable antivirus and internet security software package on your linked devices, such as your computer, laptop, and smartphone.
• Avoid clicking on suspicious links and opening email attachments without verifying they are legitimate.Inform staff members on how to guard against dangers like phishing and unsafe URLs.
• Block URLs like Torrent/Warez that might be used to propagate malware.To prevent malware or TAs from stealing data, keep an eye on the beacon at the network level.

Conclusion

Using YouTube bots may be a seductive strategy for content producers looking to increase their ranks and expand their viewership on the site. However, the employment of bots is typically regarded as unfair and may violate YouTube’s terms of service. Utilizing YouTube bots carries additional risk because they might be identified, which could lead to account suspension or termination for the user. Mitigating this pressing issue through awareness drives and surveys to determine the bone of contention is best. NonProfits and civil society organizations can bridge the gap between the tech giant and the end user to facilitate better know-how about these unknown bots.