A VIDEO SHARED on social media appears to show a teacher leading a classroom full of schoolchildren, each kneeling on their own mat, in Islamic prayer during a class.

The footage, however, is fake. It contains a number of giveaway signs that the images are generated by artificial intelligence.

The video appears to show security camera footage from within a classroom. Ten primary school-aged children kneel on small blue and green mats, facing a teacher, who wears a hijab.

“Hands up like this,” she appears to say. “Say with me, Allahu Akbar.”

A screenshot from the AI-generated video.

The teacher raises her palms in front of her and then sits back, onto a chair that did not exist until this point in the video. Meanwhile, the children, many of whom have blurry or transparent heads, begin to bow their heads to the floor.

These glitches are common in AI-generated footage, which creates a video file based on mathematical patterns discerned from other footage, and not from an understanding of the scene or objects it is supposed to be depicting.

However, the warped and low-resolution format of a security camera can obscure some of these revealing details from casual viewers. 

“Please say this is not Ireland,” a comment reads under one version of the video that has been seen 15,000 times since it was posted to Facebook on 7 November.

The video has already spread widely, mostly by UK accounts, or by people claiming that it shows a classroom in the UK.

“Young, white children are being indoctrinated into Islam”, reads one post on X by UK conservative commentator David Atherton. That post, also shared on 7 November, has been viewed more than 1.8 million times.

False claims about children being “indoctrinated into Islam” in schools are a recurring theme in anti-Muslim or anti-migrant groups.

In August, The Journal debunked posts that falsely described a years-old video showing children in a mosque learning how Muslims pray as “what they’re teaching kids now in school.”

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