Trump's video on Kirk appears to be AI(contested in comments)
Trump's video on Kirk appears to be AI(contested in comments)

Trump blames ‘radical left’ rhetoric for Charlie Kirk’s assassination in White House video statement

Trump delivered to us this uncanny video in which he denounces the killing of Kirk and blames the left’s rhetoric as the sole cause of this unfathomable act.
Am I crazy, or is this obviously AI?
Oh my... y'all need to chill.
Download yt-dlp and run this command, to get CNN's 'direct' 245MB stream on your hard drive instead of AP's (or YouTube's) tiny re-encodes on a web player:
yt-dlp -f direct https://www.cnn.com/2025/09/10/us/video/trump-oval-office-statement-white-house-charlie-kirk-death-digvid
See that combing? It's interlaced.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlaced_video
Or telecined, I think, to be more specific. While it's impossible to know what the actual feed from the White House looked like, re-encodes I'm looking at are clearly de-interlaced (poorly) which is why motion looks so weird. It's also choppy and MPEG-blocky, hallmarks of poor encoding even in a 13.9 Mb/s stream, and recompressing that to a tiny bitrate makes it even worse.
Y'all (and apparently the rest of the internet) are obsessing over literally decades-old video encoding/broadcasting issues and oldschool video filters to fix them that have nothing to with AI.
New conspiracy: The government planned this decades ago and had the video ready in advance.
Why would there be interlaced video in 2025? Fuck do they still have a tube tv?
The video encoding crowd was screaming that that 10 years ago, heh. And 20 years ago.
...Shrug. I guess people are still getting 'traditional' cable broadcasts. Turn on YouTube TV, and you can see they still use those ancient codecs (even though its all streamed), probably because they have to just comply with the system.
I'm reminded of how the high-resolution footage of Space-X's landing [attempts] from a few years ago stoked massive waves of paranoia and conspiracy across the internet because nobody had ever seen such modern footage of a spacecraft in motion and most people who saw it thought it was fake.
People really want to feel like they've figured something special out, in a world where media and information is constantly changing and advancing.
Agreed.
Though I wouldn't disparage investigation and 'figuring things out.' I'd perhaps rephrase that: "I don't have much experience with this topic, maybe I should qualifty my certainty," as a sentiment, seems to have disappeared. The Trump admin is kind of a perfect embodiment of that.
To be clear, I'm not an expert here either. I'm not a broadcast engineer or anything and would defer to some news source that actually knows what they're talking about... but I do know just enough Vapoursynth to be dangerous, and have seen what looks like this exact artifacting in way, way too many TV show broadcasts...