The Presidency on Wednesday threatened legal action against popular social media commentator, Martins Otse, widely known as Very Dark Man, accusing him of circulating an AI-generated audio falsely attributed to President Bola Tinubu in which a simulated voice made inflammatory claims about insecurity in the South-East, World Bank borrowing and the 2027 election.
Special Adviser to the President on Information and Strategy, Bayo Onanuga, made the threat in a post on his verified X handle.
This was in reaction to a video in which VDM played the audio to his followers and urged them to draw their own conclusions about its authenticity.
“This VDM needs to face the weight of the law for being the conveyor and disseminator of a fake audio of President Tinubu. This is a clear case of an egregious abuse of the social media platform,” Onanuga wrote.
The audio, which bears the hallmarks of AI voice cloning, features a voice mimicking Tinubu making a series of damaging statements, including that insecurity in the South-East was deliberate, that he had called on Labour Party presidential candidate, Peter Obi, to step down for him in 2022, that he was indifferent to the suffering of Nigerians, and that loans from the World Bank were being channelled to fund elections.
