Can we trust what we see online these days?

A video claiming to show Pope Leo XIV praising Islam as "a religion of peace we can learn from" has been making the rounds online. But here’s the catch: it’s not real. The clip was created using artificial intelligence tools, which means someone used software to make it look like the pope was saying those words. While the real Pope Leo XIV has spoken about promoting peace and understanding between different faiths, he has never used that exact phrase. A quick check of his official speeches confirms this.You might wonder how this fake video got so much attention. It was shared widely on platforms like X and Facebook in late May 2026. One clue that gave it away? The phrase "Create your own with Grok" appeared at the bottom of the video, hinting that it was made using an AI tool called Grok Imagine. The account posting it, "Wake Up America, " mostly shares AI-generated content with fake quotes, though this wasn’t their first video using fabricated speech. Experts also noticed differences between the voice in the fake video and recordings of the real pope’s voice. The pitch and tone didn’t match, which is another red flag. If this had been a real statement from the pope, news outlets would have picked it up right away. A reverse search of the video showed no matches in trusted news sources, and searches for the quote combined with the pope’s name turned up nothing credible either.