Trump, WH Stories Differ on Items Tossed Out Window

President Trump said Tuesday that a video circulating online that showed items being tossed out of an upstairs window of the White House was created with artificial intelligence, despite his press team seeming to confirm the veracity of it hours earlier. Trump, who has boasted of being an expert in building design as he takes on remodeling projects at the White House, told reporters that the video has "got to be fake" because the windows, he said, are heavy and sealed shut, per the AP.

• The video, which circulated Monday, appears to show a small black bag and a long white item being tossed out of a window on the building's east side. Trump blamed the video on AI, saying the creation of fake videos was one of the downsides of the technology, but then said, "If something happens that's really bad, maybe I'll have to just blame AI."

• Hours earlier, the White House seemed to verify that the video was real when it told several news outlets that inquired about the video that it was "a contractor who was doing regular maintenance while the president was gone." The White House didn't respond to a message later Tuesday about the discrepancy.
• Trump denied that the windows can be opened and said, "I know every window up there." He went on to claim each window weighs about 600 pounds, and that "you have to be pretty strong to open them up." After Trump viewed the video on the phone of Fox News reporter Peter Doocy, the president again said the windows are sealed and blamed AI.
• Hany Farid, a digital forensics and misinformation expert at UC Berkeley who reviewed the video, said he didn't detect any digital watermarks that are sometimes inserted into images at the point of AI generation. "The shadows in the scene, including the shadow cast by the tossed bag, are all physically consistent," Farid says. "The motion of the waving flags have none of the telltale signs that you often see in AI-generated videos. The overall structure of the White House appears to be consistent."
• Former first lady Michelle Obama, in a 2015 appearance on the Ellen DeGeneres Show, seemed to gripe about the White House window situation, noting, "The windows in our house don't open."