Did what social media described as "leaked Trump audio" from March 11, 2025, authentically capture the president calling Tesla "a modern-day Isaac Neutron"? No, that's not true: Two AI detectors found evidence that the audio was the product of voice cloning technology. The file originated from a deleted TikTok account and then was boosted by a user on X who describes their account as satire.
The claim appeared in a post (archived here) published on X on March 12, 2025. It opened:
Man...I miss the times, when Isaac Neutron was around... so does
It's fantastic, fantastic. He was a smart guy, you know, Tesla, first the light bulb, and now this, he was like a modern-day Isaac Neutron. It's remarkable, really.
This is what the post looked like on X at the time of writing:
(Source: X screenshot taken on Fri Mar 14 14:33:37 2025 UTC)
The post implied that Trump authentically mispronounced the name of Isaac Newton (archived here), a 17th-century England-born scientist who is known for his work on gravitation and laws of motion (archived here), among other things.
However, two AI detectors -- Hiya via the InVid verification plugin (archived here) and DeepFake-O-Meter (archived here) -- showed that the audio was likely AI generated:
(Source: InVid screenshot taken on Fri Mar 14 14:44:02 2025 UTC)
(Source: DeepFake-O-Meter screenshot taken on Fri Mar 14 14:24:44 2025 UTC)
Nicola Tesla (1856-1943), also mentioned in the file, was an inventor who was born into a Serbian family residing in what is now Croatia (archived here). After moving to the U.S., he lived and worked in New York City for 60 years (archived here). He worked on light bulbs in the 1890s and his idea of electric transmission was different from that of his former boss Thomas Edison (archived here), who patented his light bulb technology earlier. That said, according to the U.S. Department of Energy (archived here), the first demonstration of electric light took place decades before Edison.
The account that shared the file on X (archived here) described itself, as automatically translated from German by X:
No. 1 Satire-Icon that follows the teachings of no one.
The file did not originate from credible sources. It was first posted on TikTok by a now-deleted account @whmole.
A Google search across contents reposted from that account showed it mostly specialized in similar AI generated audio clips purporting to capture Trump's voice.
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Other Lead Stories fact checks mentioning Donald Trump can be found here.
Articles concerning claims about science are here.
