Israel Indicates a Popular Iranian Military Spokesman Is AI-Generated

An Iranian regime military spokesman has an army of fans, but is he real, or an Artificial Intelligence-generated depiction of a man killed a while back in American-Israeli strikes?Despite suspicion that he is dead, the spokesman for the united command of Iran’s military forces, Lieutenant Colonel Ebrahim Zolfaghari, keeps popping up on local television stations and across the web. A charismatic, fatigue-clad personality, the military man threatens American forces in the region with the worst punishment and trolls President Trump and other officials. There is no confirmation of a widely spread assertion across the web that Colonel Zolfaghari was killed in a joint American-Israeli strike on March 7. No official Iranian obituary has been issued. Yet now the Israel Defense Forces adds its voice to a growing chorus of skeptics, challenging Iranian followers to prove that Colonel Zolfaghari is alive. “Dear people of Iran,” the IDF writes in its Farsi-language X account. “Ebrahim Zolfaghari seems more like an artificial intelligence product to us than a real human being,” the post asserts, according to an English translation. “If you have seen him in an interview or in the field, tell us. If not, help us prove that he is an artificial intelligence product.” If the latter, the post concludes, “what does this say about the credibility of their messages?” Iranians claim hackers from Communist China are responsible for creating Colonel Zolfaghari’s AI messages to fit the regime’s propaganda. They note that the language in his speeches is too formal for a native Farsi speaker. The backdrop to the videos is always black, presumably to avoid detection of location and time. Observers note that the regime’s Iranian flag displayed in the videos seems penned-in, rather than real. “Hey Trump, you’re fired,” Colonel Zolfaghari said in a recent video, speaking in English with a heavy Persian accent. “You’re familiar with this phrase. Thank you for your attention to this matter.” Another video, in a heavy-accented Hebrew, quotes a Biblical passage from the Book of Ezekiel. Colonel Zolfaghari, or his AI-self, serves as spokesman for Khatam al-Anbiya Central Headquarters, which unifies the Iranian Army, Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, and other arms of the country’s military. In addition to video postings, he maintains an X account, @Irantimes01, which boasts 31,000 followers. “If the U.S. blockade persists, we will halt all trade in the Arabian Gulf and Arabian Sea,” the colonel posted in English on Thursday. “If it continues, Red Sea shipping will also be stopped. Such actions will be seen as a step toward violating the ceasefire.” Skeptics, though, note that no one in the country would say Arabian Gulf, which Iranians know as the Persian Gulf.Regardless, Colonel Zolfaghari has amassed a huge following across the region and in the West. “A lot of American women are in love with this guy,” a correspondent for the London-based Iran International, Negar Mojtahedi, tells The New York Sun. “It’s really disturbing and disgusting to see that, you know, obviously non-Iranian women in the West are falling for these types of characters.”The Iranian regime is widely hailed for its mastery of Artificial Intelligence meme-generation. A recent example riffs on a posting by Mr. Trump, which depicted the president as Jesus — or, as the White House later claimed, a healer. A widely shared Iranian AI-generated video took the now-deleted Trump posting and showed Jesus descending from the skies, hitting the president over the head, and sending his blood-soaked body to hell. An X account of the chief Iranian negotiator with America, parliament Speaker Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf, is written in perfect English, peppered with smart observations fitting the regime’s messages. According to the website Iran Wire, though, the postings are written by a former Ghalibaf adviser, Meysam Zamanabadi, who has lived in California for years.

Israel Indicates a Popular Iranian Military Spokesman Is AI-Generated

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