Mike Bamiloye and Elon Musk
|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
Claim: Popular Nigerian gospel actor Mike Bamiloye shared photos of a robot with the face of Tesla Inc.’s chief executive officer, Elon Musk. He claimed that the development heralds the arrival of the Beast, a mythical figure in the Bible.
Verdict: FALSE. The pictures were generated using artificial intelligence (AI) tools. Also, existing robots associated with Mr Musk are called Optimus, a faceless general-purpose humanoid robot that bears no resemblance to him.
Full Text
Mike Bamiloye, a veteran gospel actor and producer in Nigeria, shared keyframes from a reel posted by Chika Eze, a digital content creator verified on Facebook. In the post’s caption, Mr Bamiloye said the pictures were robotic images of Elon Musk that an unidentified scientist created.
“Now it is getting clearer and clearer. When I read of the image of the…, he is not the Beast, but the land is being prepared, and puzzles are being put together. If you know what I mean,” he wrote.
The statement is an evasive reference to one of the events depicted as the Great Tribulation in the Bible’s book of Revelations.
As of Feb. 6, 2025, the post has gained over 3,300 reactions, 1,300 comments, and 347 reshares on Facebook since Mr Bamiloye posted the pictures on Feb. 3, 2025. Meanwhile, Mr Eze’s reel generated over 3,000 reactions, 125 comments, and 542 reshares since he posted it on Jan. 29, 2025.
The claim’s implication and potential to spread fears prompted DUBAWA to fact-check the visuals.
Verification
We observed that the images on Mr Bamiloye’s page and the video on Mr Eze’s reel depicted traits of deepfakes that DUBAWA had described here and here. Deepfake identification tools like Deepware and AI or Not could not confirm if the video was made with AI.
We realised that Eze overlaid the deepfake on another video of him describing the video as a robotic replica of Elon Musk. This hindered the deepfake verification tools’ efficiency.
However, we used Is It AI, an AI detection tool, to analyse the images on Bamiloye’s page. One of them was judged to be 67% likely generated by AI.
The rate increased to 81% when we scanned another image on the tool, revealing that Midjourney was the visuals’ potential source.
Knowing that such an event would gain publicity for its innovation if true, DUBAWA ran a keyword search on robots associated with Mr Musk. We found that his company is building a general-purpose humanoid robot called Optimus. However, unlike the image that went viral on Facebook, the Optimus robot is faceless.
DUBAWA conducted a reverse image search to find the video’s earliest appearance. We discovered that Pak Tech, a YouTube channel, posted the video on Jan. 28, 2025.
Conclusion
The video from which the keyframes were obtained was generated using artificial intelligence. The Optimus robot has no human face, let alone Elon Musk’s face. Therefore, the claim is false and has no connection with the Beast.
A little grifter uses a big grifter.