Chinese Paraglider Video Exposed as AI Manipulation, Experts Say

Video footage of a Chinese paraglider that captured global media attention last week contained elements manipulated by artificial intelligence, according to digital forensics experts.

The remarkable images showed 55-year-old paraglider Peng Yujiang with his face encrusted in ice, supposedly after being sucked nearly 8,600 meters into the upper atmosphere. The footage was widely distributed by Chinese state media outlet CCTV through Reuters and subsequently picked up by numerous international news organizations, including ABC.

Reuters has since distanced itself from the content. “The content is clearly labelled as third-party content and is not verified or endorsed by Reuters,” the company said in a statement. “When we became aware of a piece of content that likely contained AI-generated elements on the Reuters Connect platform, we investigated and took it down because the material does not comply with our partner content policy.”

ABC also removed its original reporting on the incident, publishing an editor’s note clarifying that Peng’s altitude claim could not be independently verified.

Digital analysis experts identified several inconsistencies that point to manipulation, though they acknowledged the video’s low quality made definitive assessment challenging.

“It’s difficult to figure out if it’s real or fake,” said Associate Professor Abhinav Dhall from Monash University’s Department of Data Science and AI. “But if we closely observe the starting 3 or 4 seconds of this video, we can see that the clouds in the background do not really look real. They look as if it’s a 2D picture.”

TJ Thomson, a generative AI and journalism researcher at RMIT, noted that the manipulation wasn’t immediately obvious. “It didn’t seem overly dodgy or suspicious at first glance especially looking at it on a small smartphone screen with our attention frayed,” he said.

Careful examination revealed telling inconsistencies. “If you look at it more closely, I think things start to come to the surface. You can pick up little things — the color of the helmet, for example, changing color,” Thomson added. “The color of cord shifts over time, looks like the ground’s visible and then not a few seconds later.”

Other discrepancies include scenes showing the paraglider’s feet hanging freely in some frames while appearing in a cocoon harness in others.

Experts note that Peng’s claimed altitude is theoretically possible. German paraglider Ewa Wisnierska survived being lifted almost 10,000 meters into the air above New South Wales during a 2007 storm. What appears questionable is the video evidence itself, which may combine actual footage with AI-generated or edited content.

The incident highlights growing challenges for media organizations operating with reduced resources while facing an unprecedented flood of user-generated content. “We see 728,000 hours of video being uploaded online every day and more than three billion images being uploaded online every day,” Thomson explained. “It can be helpful to integrate that crowd-sourced footage into our reporting, but the scale and speed by which that content travels is really hard for journalists to fact-check.”

Australia’s Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance (MEAA), representing journalists across the country, has been advocating for government regulation of AI technologies. “Our members have been telling us that they are concerned about misinformation and disinformation and the potential erosion of public trust in journalism and the media,” a spokesperson said.

MEAA chief executive Erin Madeley warned last year that AI generation threatens to “drive the erosion of our news and information to the point where the community cannot tell fact from fiction.”

Dr. Dhall described the situation as a “big, generational change” in how users can manipulate data, requiring responses from both industry and government. “I reckon it will take some time for systems — automatic systems and human observers — to get on page and quickly realize that something is fake or not,” he said.

Despite the challenges, Dhall remains optimistic. “There is hope. There is research going on within academia and industry, developing tools that will be able to identify AI manipulation, along with a human being.”