AI-generated clip glorifying Burkina Faso's leader was not released by singer R. Kelly

Yahoo

14-05-2025

'Very emotional song,' reads the caption of a post shared more than 41,000 times on TikTok.
The clip, published on May 8, 2025, shows photos of singer R. Kelly and Burkina Faso's interim leader Ibrahim Traore while a song plays in the background.
'Even while serving a 30-year imprisonment in North Carolina, America, R. Kelly dedicates a song for Capt. Ibrahim Traore,' reads a block of text with the clip.
The song's lyrics lavish praise on Traore, who led a military coup in 2022.
'In the heart of Africa, I see your flame. A young man rises, we call his name Ibrahim Traore, standing tall for the love of his people. He risked it all, bullets fly but he don't fall, he's walking through the fire still answering the call with the faith in his chest … he's fighting for peace in his motherland.'
The claim has also been shared on Facebook with a purported music video, by accounts operating in different countries including Niger, Cameroon, Burkina Faso and Nigeria.
R. Kelly, whose full name is Robert Sylvester Kelly, shot to fame with hits like 'I Believe I Can Fly' and 'Burn It Up'.
The 58-year-old singer is serving a 30-year jail term after he was found guilty of various sex crimes, including the exploitation of children (archived here).
He is an inmate at a medium-security federal prison in North Carolina (archived here).
After his imprisonment, an album he had previously recorded was briefly released in December 2022 before being taken off music platforms. At the time, a lawyer for Kelly said the release was not authorised (archived here).
The posts claiming to feature a new song and music video by R. Kelly are false.
There has been no announcement from R. Kelly or his representatives about releasing a new song.
An internet search of the lyrics did not show that it had previously been sung by an artist, a signal that it might have been created using generative AI.
Keyword searches using portions of the lyrics drew a blank; none of the results led to official websites or social media accounts identifying R. Kelly – or any other artist – as the songwriter.
Meanwhile, the video attached to some of the social media posts contains visual inconsistencies, such as cartoonish characters who display robotic movements typical of AI-generated content.
At the 47-second mark in the video, a man who appears to salute Traore has six fingers while the other characters in the scene have stubbed fingers; these are common errors in AI-generated images (archived here).
AFP Fact Check used the Google Lens tool to conduct reverse image searches on keyframes from the video.
The results showed that the same video was published on YouTube on May 3, 2025, days before it started circulating on social media (archived here).
In the caption, YouTube categorised the content as 'altered or synthetic content' that was 'significantly edited or digitally generated'.
The YouTube account's history showed that its owner had created other AI-generated music videos credited to different artists. Some of the songs are duets, including artists like Beyonce, Diddy and even 2Pac, who died in 1996 (archived here).
AFP Fact Check has previously debunked a claim that R. Kelly released a music video from prison, and another claim that suggested that French Malian singer Aya Nakamura declared support for Traore in a music video.
Read other debunks related to artificial intelligence here.