| schema:text
| - Misleading: This AI dance video is not a promo for US women’s volleyball team for the Olympics
A video of female athletes in red and white jerseys dancing to Korean children’s pop song “Happy” in front of the Eiffel Tower was shared on Xiaohongshu on June 27, a month before the 2024 Paris Olympics.
“The U.S. women’s volleyball team’s Paris Olympics promotional video,” the post’s caption says.
In the 10-second clip, a man who appears to be the coach can also be seen dancing with the 17 female athletes. When asked if the video was real, the Xiaohongshu user who uploaded it replied, “It is true.”
A similar video was posted on Weibo on June 16. The 26-second clip shows the same people doing the same dance but to a different song: “Oen Ai Nae Doe Yam Thoe Mi Haeng” (Call Me When You Are Strong Again) from Thailand.
The Weibo post claimed that the “people who appeared in front of the camera were [Karch] Kiraly,” the head coach of the U.S. women’s volleyball team, “the 12 players and five substitute players previously announced for the Paris Olympics.”
The two videos have received more than 20,000 likes. The longer video was also posted in June and July on other Chinese social media platforms, such as NetEase and Bilibili.
However, the video is not a promotion for the U.S. women’s volleyball team. Annie Lab’s investigation found that it was likely created by a U.S. volleyball fan account on TikTok using generative AI tools to animate the dance content.
The video also does not accurately depict the U.S. team; an athlete not in the national team for the Paris Games is included, and another representing the U.S. is, instead, left out.
Fan video
A reverse image search led us to a video posted by a TikTok account called @usavolleyball_thaifan on June 8, captioned: “See you in Paris.”
It also features the song “Oen Ai Nae Doe Yam Thoe Mi Haeng,” performed by Lamyai Haithongkham, a mor lam singer from Thailand’s Isan region. The tune, sung in the Isan dialect, was originally from 2014, but it became a hit this year after Lamyai did a cover version.
One day later, the same TikTok account uploaded a dancing video of the men’s U.S. team, similar to the clip of the U.S. women’s national team. Annie Lab tried to contact the TikTok user through direct message but did not receive a reply.
These two videos do not appear on the USA Volleyball Team’s official website or any of their social media accounts, such as Instagram, Facebook, X, TikTok and YouTube.
Laura Fawcett, the senior manager of digital media and content strategy at USA Volleyball, confirmed to Annie Lab through email that “USA Volleyball was not involved in” the dancing video.
Genuine images
A reverse image search using a cropped screenshot of each player in the video led us to a match statistics website called Volley Station. The website posts full-body photos of USA women’s volleyball team members wearing red jerseys.
Out of the 18 animated figures in the video, 15 have their matching still photographs on Volley Station.
Annie Lab compared the images of two athletes from the Volley Station with screenshots taken from the video:
The players’ outfits and hairstyles in the Volley Station pictures are identical to those in the misleading video.
The two athletes in white jerseys were identified as Kelsey Robinson-Cook (No. 23) and Annie Drews (No. 11). Through keyword searches of their names, we found the source images were on the USA Volleyball team’s official page (Drews and Robinson-Cook).
The man in the middle of the video was allegedly coach Karch Kiraly, who was named head coach for the Paris Games. We did not find the source image of his animation.
Generative AI tool
Annie Lab spotted the Viggle AI watermark in the video.
A search with the keywords “TikTok dance AI video” led to some tutorials, such as this one, on how to use Viggle AI to animate photos into a dance clip, similar to the video in question.
To create animation with Viggle, a user must provide an image of a person to be animated, as well as a short video or a text prompt describing the motion. The user can also choose from a list of motion templates offered by Viggle.
We tried to make a generative AI video with Viggle using Micha Hancock’s image from the Volley Station and a copyright-free dance video from Polina Tankilevitch on Pexels as the motion reference. See the result below:
Viggle also allows users to choose a background image of their choice.
U.S. women’s national team
We identified the athletes in the viral TikTok video through the athlete profiles on Volley Station and the Paris Games page on USA Volleyball.
Out of the 17 players who appear in the video, only Alexandra Frantti (No. 5) was not listed on the U.S. women’s national volleyball team roster for the Paris Olympics.
The video also excluded a player listed as an alternate for the Games: Sarah Wilhite Parsons (No. 13).
|
![[RDF Data]](/fct/images/sw-rdf-blue.png)
![[cxml]](/fct/images/cxml_doc.png)
![[csv]](/fct/images/csv_doc.png)
![[text]](/fct/images/ntriples_doc.png)
![[turtle]](/fct/images/n3turtle_doc.png)
![[ld+json]](/fct/images/jsonld_doc.png)
![[rdf+json]](/fct/images/json_doc.png)
![[rdf+xml]](/fct/images/xml_doc.png)
![[atom+xml]](/fct/images/atom_doc.png)
![[html]](/fct/images/html_doc.png)