A video of Anthony Joshua announcing his retirement from professional boxing has gone viral on social media.
In the clip, a distraught Joshua is seen at a press conference saying the decision to quit the sport stems from the death of his two associates during a recent car accident on the Lagos-Ibadan expressway.
On December 29, a Lexus SUV conveying Joshua and his entourage rammed into a stationary truck along the expressway.
Two of Joshua’s close associates — Kevin Latif Ayodele, his personal trainer, and Sina Ghami, his strength and conditioning coach — died in the accident.
The boxer survived the crash with injuries and had to be taken to a medical hospital in Lagos.
In the viral video of Joshua speaking on the accident, the boxer appeared to wish he had died in the crash instead of his friends.
“They have left this world because of me. Therefore, I have officially decided to step away from boxing,” the former heavyweight boxing champion purportedly said.
“Because the moment I step into the ring, their faces appear in my mind, and that grief completely crushes me.”
The video was shared by Ope Royal TV on Facebook and has over 220k views with at least 1.2k shares.
CableCheck identified several irregularities in the footage consistent with artificial intelligence (AI) manipulation.
It contained several independent clips of the boxer spliced together with an AI-generated voice-over.
The beginning of the footage was grafted from the press conference Joshua held after losing to Oleksandr Usyk for the second time on 20 August 2022.
AI was then used to sync his mouth with the words from the already doctored voice-over.
Joshua was only discharged from the hospital on December 31 and has yet to speak publicly since the accident.
VERDICT
The viral video of Anthony Joshua announcing his retirement from professional boxing over the death of his friends is AI-generated.
