Elon Musk’s X Finally Tries to Stop the Epidemic of AI-Generated War Footage

It's unclear if other types of non-AI video will also be penalized. The social media platform X has been flooded with fake photos and videos ever since President Donald Trump launched a new war on Iran last week. But X’s head of product Nikita Bier announced a new policy Tuesday that he hopes will disincentivize accounts from sharing AI-generated fakes. At least when the motivation for sharing is purely financial. “Starting now, users who post AI-generated videos of an armed conflict—without adding a disclosure that it was made with AI—will be suspended from Creator Revenue Sharing for 90 days,” Bier wrote Tuesday in a post on X. “Subsequent violations will result in a permanent suspension from the program. This will be flagged to us by any post with a Community Note or if the content contains meta data (or other signals) from generative AI tools,” Bier continued. It’s not immediately clear whether there will be requirements for how large a disclosure may need to appear and whether it needs to be embedded into the video or can be merely included in the text of a tweet. There are plenty of loopholes that X accounts use for impersonation, like making a username so long that the word “parody” only appears if you click through to view a given account’s profile. The potential loopholes here also seem endless. U.S.-Iran War fakery Fake photos and videos have gotten millions of views in recent days, ever since the U.S. and Israel launched a war in Iran that has killed Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and a large number of other Iranian officials. And until Tuesday it showed no signs of slowing down. One of the fake images included a U.S. fighter pilot who was shot down and supposedly mistaken for an Iranian by a Kuwaiti man with a pipe. The image includes the SynthID watermark from Google, meaning it was created using one of Google’s generative AI products. If you look closely, the people in the image are also missing some fingers, a classic sign of fakery by AI. AI-generated image that went viral purporting to show an American fighter pilot shot down in Kuwait. Image: X Several different accounts on X have also shared footage that purports to show Tel Aviv, Israel, getting bombarded with rockets. But the video has several big red flags that indicate it’s been generated with AI, according to BBC disinformation tracker Shayan Sardarizadeh. The most glaring might be the cars on the street, which are in bizarre shapes and don’t look like real cars. But there’s also the audio, which includes someone off-camera saying “Tel Aviv, I can’t believe this,” in an unnatural way that’s just a little too perfect if you’re trying to spread fake information about a specific location. Many X users have asked xAI’s Grok whether the video is real and it seems to be consistently responding that it is. One user who shared the video even insisted that it must be real because Grok said so. #ULTIMAHORA🚨 CASTIGA IRÁN CON FURIA A TEL AVIV Y si, si es real, si gustan chequen con @grok… pic.twitter.com/oypZhe0OrE — La Catrina Norteña (@catrina_nortena) March 3, 2026 But Grok is an awful fact-checker and can’t be relied upon to tell you whether a video is real, just as it shouldn’t be used for anything involving World War II history. This is MechaHitler himself, after all. Mislabeled videos One question that hasn’t been answered by X is whether misleading images and videos that aren’t necessarily created with AI will be demonetized. Because there are plenty of other ways to mislead people on social media in a time of war. A popular fake video that’s gone viral also purported to show the U.S. embassy in Saudi Arabia going up in flames. The embassy was indeed hit by two Iranian drones on Monday, according to the New York Times, but that’s not what’s depicted in the video. BREAKING 🚨 EXPLOSIONS REPORTED AT THE US EMBASSY IN RIYADH, SAUDI ARABIA pic.twitter.com/eMQVdDICol — Iran Times (@IranTimes9) March 3, 2026 In reality, the video above is about a month old at minimum, having been posted to YouTube on Feb. 6. It has nothing to do with the current war. While the video appears to be real, it’s being misrepresented as something that happened recently. Another video was captioned “An Iranian plane VS a US ship. I can watch this all day,” racking up over seven million views. It’s actually footage from a video game. Is creating a video clip of game footage and presenting it as current events going to qualify X users for demonetization? There’s no sign that it was created using AI, which is the only thing Bier mentioned in his tweet Tuesday. An Iranian plane VS a US ship. I can watch this all day 😂 pic.twitter.com/qjLH2rA8V1 — Joel Fischer 🇺🇸 (@realJoelFischer) March 1, 2026 Still another video that gained significant attention supposedly showed the “CIA headquarters” in Dubai with smoke b