Politics: A Forensic Analysis of the Peter Obi and Bishop Oyedepo’s “Yes Daddy” Leaked Audio – Democracy Watchman

Since the audio was released by Peoples Gazette yesterday, there have been two lines of defence taken by members of the Peter Obi inner circle.

While some have come out to debunk the audio as alright falsehood, some others like Kenneth Okonkwo have come out to clarify and explain the conversation in the audio as being a false representation of the real conversation.
So I decided to do a forensic analysis of the audio to see what the evidence will expose.

If this audio was presented before a court, it would be analysed by forensic experts to prove its authenticity before it can be admissible in court.
So in the court of public opinion, it is only fair that we do a proper analysis of the audio to see if it is admissible or if it should be discredited.

Here’s what I found:

First Analysis:

The first step is to analyse the audio itself for any form of manipulation. Is this an authentic audio that has been cut and joined or this is an entirely scripted conversation that never took place?

That question is not so hard to answer, as a quick “Scene Edit Detection” check on Adobe Premier Pro reveals that the audio has indeed been manipulated.

Premier Pro was able to detect 4 different audios that have been put together to form the 4mins 17 secs clip.

Whiles this is a good first start, it is important to know that the audio has been compressed multiple times as it was moved from one platform to another, and it has been stripped of all its meta data. So the full scope of the manipulation cannot be ascertained until we see the original clip.

Second Analysis:
The second analysis is based on the theory that the clip is Ai generated and an outright falsehood. To prove or disprove this theory, I relied on the only tool that is 99% reliable – AI.
Using an AI tool created to detect AI generated audio, I ran a scan of the leaked audio.
For the avoidance of doubt, here is the tool in question:
https://github.com/dessa-oss/fake-voice-detection

And here is an article by the creator explaining how it works:
https://medium.com/dessa-news/detecting-audio-deepfakes-f2edfd8e2b35

After running the leaked audio through the Deepfake Detector, this is what you get:

The image below shows that the audio was indeed AI generated and a fake audio.
The second screenshot is from the article written by the AI creator explaining how it works, that s how you know the audio is AI generated.

If we should put the first analysis and the second analysis together, we can draw some obvious conclusions:

1. The APC propaganda team probably have an audio recording of Peter Obi and Bishop Oyedepo, however the content of that conversation is different from what is in the leaked audio. As they could have taken a recording of their conversation and fed it into an AI. Then all they had to do was create a different script and the AI will generate an audio conversation of the two that is almost indistinguishable from the original.

2. Another possible scenario will be that the APC team joined together both original and fake conversations between Peter Obi and Bishop Oyedepo as it is obvious that the audio was edited and atleast 4 different audios were put together (that we could verify). The analysis I have put forward are simple and straightforward and anyone can as well do them.

So if you do not believe the evidence provided, you can as well run your own analysis to confirm or deny my analysis. Given how serious the audio is, I was expecting People’s Gazette to have run a thorough analysis of the audio before putting it out. But given that they are known for being very liberal with the truth, I am not surprised they put very little effort into verifying its authenticity given the amount of traffic the news would have generated for them.

However, in all this, the most worrying fact is this possibility that the APC has been using government agencies to wiretap opposition candidates.
Do we have a possible #Watergate on our hands? Only time will tell how this story plays out.
In an attempt to discredit Peter Obi, the APC might just have unknowingly doomed themselves and exposed their unsanctioned surveillance of the opposition.