BBC Verify has examined claims that a widely shared video of Manchester City CEO Ferran Soriano was generated by artificial intelligence, concluding there is no reliable evidence to prove it either way.
Ruben Dias was appointed Manchester City captain after Bernardo Silva's departure this summer,
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A clip of Ferran Soriano has spent the past few days ricocheting around social media with an unusual accusation attached: that the Manchester City chief executive in it might not be real at all.
Enough people became convinced the footage had been created - or at least enhanced - by Artificial Intelligence that the BBC’s fact-checking arm decided to take a closer look.
What they found was rather less dramatic than the conspiracy suggested, but the controversy offers an illustration of just how powerful suspicion around City and its top employees has become.
Manchester City CEO Ferran Soriano has addressed club staff directly following the Premier League's publication of an independent commission finding that the club breached the league's financial rules between 2009 and 2018.cityxtra.co.ukManchester City CEO Ferran Soriano has addressed club staff directly following the Premier League's publication of an independent commission finding that the club breached the league's financial rules between 2009 and 2018.
Man City CEO Ferran Soriano Sends Rallying Message to Club Staff After Independent Commission Guilty Verdict
Why people thought Ferran Soriano's video was AI
The suspicion came primarily from one detail on Soriano’s face above all. “Look at his eyes,” the video urges - because, as BBC Verify’s Aisha Sembhi put it, "For most of this three-and-a-half minute long video, he’s not blinking.”
A human subject who barely blinks for several minutes has traditionally been considered one of the classic tells of a deepfake, and that was enough to set social media talking. The footage, Sembhi explained, “was reportedly released internally to City staff, but has since made its way to social media”.
Even so, BBC Verify was quick to caution against jumping to conclusions. “Whilst it’s good to be sceptical about the things you see online, nowadays, that alone isn’t enough,” Sembhi noted.
What the investigation into the video found
BBC Verify ran the clip through several checks. An AI model was asked to scan for signatures of synthetic media and reported back that it “couldn’t find any reliable signals showing how this was created - no SynthID watermark and no Content Credentials,” adding that this did not confirm the footage was “authentic or AI-generated” either way.
The team also studied the movement of Soriano’s mouth and his facial features, and returned to the blinking that had started it all.
As it turned out, Soriano does blink twice towards the end of the clip, and separate footage of the executive suggests he is simply not someone who blinks all that often. To be safe, BBC Verify also put the original video to an expert for a second opinion.
In other words, the single biggest piece of “evidence” that the video was fake had a far more mundane explanation.
Investigation and talk leads to Soriano response
Now, it is being reported by The Times' Martyn Ziegler that Ferran Soriano himself has insisted his video message sent to staff this week about the verdicts on Premier League rule breaches was not made with artificial intelligence.
The 59-year-old has instead insisted that the video was “all me”, while the report quotes 'body language experts', who also say that if someone is 'intensely focused' on a task they can go 'some time' without blinking.