Video editors have been discussing the widely speculated-on glitch that occurred in President Trump’s address to the nation video regarding the assassination of Charlie Kirk.
At roughly 20 seconds into the video, see below, Trump appears to glitch, suddenly shifting to his right at an unnatural speed.
Online, people pointed out that Trump’s pinky finger on his right hand appears to temporarily disappear. Other elements move oddly as well, including the blurred background in the window behind him.
In the charged political climate that the US finds itself in today, it didn’t take long for people to accuse the White House of putting out an AI-generated video of the president. But what is really going on here?
NBC News spoke to a series of “digital forensics experts” who all said that the glitch is strange but all agreed that rather than being synthetic, it shows evidence of multiple videos being stitched together.
The Trump administration is the first government to embrace AI imagery; with Trump showing a fondness of posting AI images that are often silly.
@brianalldridge Here’s a quick breakdown of the video editing technique used in the latest press release.
But in a piece of media as serious as this one then surely no AI would be used. Brian Alldridge, a filmmaker, took to TikTok to share his theory that the glitch is a ‘morph cut.’
“What’s happening here is you’ve got two separate clips that are stitched together and what the software will do is analyze the difference between those clips and generate new frames to fill the gap,” Alldridge says. “What that does is get you between two clips.”
Alldridge adds that the morph cut was developed by Lucafilm for use in Star Wars so editors could splice two different takes together.
“In videos like this, it’s mainly used to smooth over filler words like er, um, and pauses,” says Alldridge. “And it works best when your on-screen talent is sitting very still, like he is in this video.”
In response to NBC, a White House spokesperson says “there was no AI used in this video.” Adding, “anyone sharing deranged conspiracy theories should be ashamed of themselves.”