WHAT WAS CLAIMED
A large wooden cross has been installed in the Oval Office of the White House.
OUR VERDICT
False. A video depicting the cross being erected has been generated using artificial intelligence.
AAP FACTCHECK - A video that portrays a large wooden cross being installed in the Oval Office of the White House is fake, but this hasn't stopped it being widely shared on social media.
Telltale signs in the footage show it is generated by artificial intelligence (AI) and a more recent video from the Oval Office does not show the presence of a wooden cross in the office of the US president.
The video has been shared to Facebook, with overlaid text that reads: "Trump becomes 1st sitting U.S President to install a cross in the oval office."
Another post is captioned: "The devil kicked out of the oval office … President Donald J. Trump first seating [sic] Potus to have the cross installed in the oval office."
The video portrays workmen in hi-vis gear appearing to hang a large wooden cross behind the president's desk, at the window overlooking the Rose Garden, as shown in a Shutterstock image from inside the office.
The same golden drapes that hang in the Oval Office are visible, as well as US flags hanging either side of the window.
The cross is a symbol of the Christian faith and while Donald Trump does not profess to be an evangelical Christian, he has strong support among white evangelical Christian voters in the US - about eight in 10 supported Mr Trump's re-election in November 2024 according to AP VoteCast.
The president has even signed an executive order to establish a "faith office" in the White House, "to assist faith-based entities, community organisations, and houses of worship in their efforts to strengthen American families, promote work and self-sufficiency, and protect religious liberty".
However, there have been no reports of the president installing a wooden cross in the Oval Office.
Plus, there are telltale signs in the video that it has been created using AI.
For example, the worker in the yellow jacket to the left of the shot has random letters (IHOOG) on his back, a common feature of AI-generated images and video.
Toby Walsh, a professor of AI at the University of New South Wales, told AAP FactCheck that AI still struggles with writing in signs.
Also, the worker behind the desk, closest to the cross, fades through the cross as though he's a ghost (nine seconds), losing his black overcoat in the process.
The video shows two US flags hanging either side of the central Oval Office window but the flag on the right should be the President's flag, a constant feature of the Oval Office.
A multistorey building comes into view on the left out of the window (0:12) but there's no such tower block in President's Park at the White House and no building like the one shown is visible from the window of the Oval Office, as seen in a 2019 image published by Politico.
A more recent view from the Oval Office can be seen in Fox News footage from March 5. There is no wooden cross behind the president.
The video appears to have originated on TikTok, where it was shared on February 17.
It has since been removed, but the user seems to have later reshared it on a backup account, where it appears alongside similar AI videos depicting large wooden crosses being installed in various different locations around the White House.
An AI expert told AAP FactCheck that the very act of people noticing 'artefacts', or flaws, in AI-generated imagery and reporting them becomes part of AI's learning process.
Berlin-based AI expert Adam Harvey told AAP FactCheck the telltale signs an image was the product of AI used to be deformations in the fingers and ears, but this is no longer the case.
"As flaws are pointed out they are then fixed," Dr Harvey said.
"In a way, users or viewers provide unpaid digital labor for debugging the issues with AI by posting their complaints to social media and it becomes part of the product development cycle."
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