Is a video of TV personality Mark Cuban describing a "removed" "Shark Tank" episode that featured a natural cure to high blood sugar real? No, that's not true: Cuban denied the claim to Lead Stories, calling it "an obviously bad deep fake." An AI-detection tool deemed the audio from the claim 99.9 percent AI-generated. Lead Stories found that the visuals used in the claim were from an interview where Cuban did not talk about blood sugar medication or a banned "Shark Tank" episode.
The claim appeared in a post on Facebook (archived here) on May 5, 2024. The caption read:
Unforeseen breakthrough triggers controversial new approach to ending diabetes.
This is what the post looked like on Facebook at the time of writing:
(Source: Facebook screenshot taken on Tue May 7 13:53:14 2024 UTC)
The video shows Mark Cuban describing how he and the other co-hosts of "Shark Tank" were "fighting" to get a share of a company started by a scientist. According to the claim, the unnamed scientist had created a unnamed compound that helps lower blood sugar levels naturally. Cuban says that after this episode aired, the pharmaceutical industry got the episode taken down, but it is still possible to get this product if viewers click the "Learn More" button at the bottom of the post.
When Lead Stories asked Cuban if this claim was true, he responded in a May 7, 2024, email with:
No. Its a scam. An obviously bad deep fake
Lead Stories also used the Hive Moderation AI Generated Content Detection Tool to analyze 30 seconds of audio from the claim. The tool told us that the audio was 99.9 percent likely to be AI-generated. Evidence of the result is below:
(Source: Hivemoderation.com screenshot taken on Tue May 07 15:28:28 2024 UTC)
A reverse image search of Cuban in the video on Facebook (archived here) led us to an interview he did on "The Daily Show" in September 2022. In it, Cuban is sitting in front of the same background and is wearing the same light blue collared shirt and dark blue sports jacket with a microphone on his left lapel. Below is a comparison of the two images:
(Source: Facebook and YouTube screenshots taken on Tue May 7 15:44:59 2024 UTC)
Cuban did not mention a natural blood sugar medication, a suppressed episode or a young scientist in the 2022 interview.
More Lead Stories articles where public figures are incorrectly linked with medical cures are here.
