A six-fingered Leonardo DiCaprio and the creature from Ridley Scott’s ‘Alien’ stuff a ballot box in this Russian PSA about AI-generated election fraud videos

The Telegram channel Voyna s Feykami posted an AI-generated video about ballot stuffing. It shows a six-fingered Leonardo DiCaprio, soccer player Cristiano Ronaldo, and the alien from Ridley Scott’s film “Alien” dropping ballots into a ballot box. A voice-over warns that videos purporting to show election violations may have been generated using AI.

“Stay alert! In the coming days, as the election approaches, pressure on Russians will mount. Don’t believe everything you see online,” the channel says in the post accompanying the video. The channel urges readers to rely “only on official sources” for information about the election.

By the time this article was published, the video featuring DiCaprio had been viewed more than 100,000 times and shared by several other Telegram channels.

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Voyna s Feykami is run by Dialog, an autonomous nonprofit organization established by the Moscow authorities in 2019 as an online “citizen feedback” center. As Proekt reported, Dialog was actually tasked with promoting political advertising ahead of the vote on constitutional amendments. During the pandemic, Dialog was also responsible for providing information about the coronavirus. After Russia criminalized spreading false information about the virus, the organization began searching for such content.

The organization’s responsibilities expanded after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Dialog employees handled communications for the Defense Ministry and also fabricated stories about Ukraine. During this period, Dialog launched the Voyna s Feykami Telegram channel and a website of the same name.

In 2023, Meduza, iStories, and The Bell published a joint investigation into Dialog’s work. We found that Sergei Kiriyenko, the first deputy chief of staff of Russia’s Presidential Administration, oversees the organization on the Kremlin’s behalf. Sources described Vladimir Tabak, who has headed Dialog since 2021, as “Surkov’s man,” whom Kiriyenko had “inherited” along with his position. According to the sources, Kiriyenko personally visited the organization’s office to celebrate their victory in the vote on the constitutional amendments.

The journalists also examined Dialog’s internal guidelines for “debunking fake news.” When there is no basis whatsoever for refuting a story, the guidelines instruct employees to discredit the source, point out that the report contains no photos or videos, or suggest who might benefit from spreading it.

Voyna s Feykami has claimed, for example, that Ukrainian air defenses caused a gas explosion — not a Russian missile strike — that killed 46 people in an apartment building in Dnipro. It also described the strike that killed 12 people at a pizzeria in Kramatorsk as an attack on “a deployment site for foreign mercenaries.”