ROCHESTER — Recently, a social media post carried a narrative of Bishop Robert Barron being summoned to Rome by Pope Leo XIV for high-level talks to hash out areas of disagreement.
In another, Barron, who is bishop of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Winona-Rochester and founder of the global Catholic media ministry Word on Fire, is said to have had an altercation with a person at a Chicago restaurant.
And yet, in another, Barron offers recommendations on how to remove demons from one’s toilet.
The problem is, none of them were true.
All of them were fakes generated by artificial intelligence.
“Everybody. This is all ridiculous,” Barron said.
Barron took to X
on Tuesday, Aug. 19, 2025, to decry a growing social media trend, the phenomenon of deepfake videos where the likenesses of high-profile people are used to create false stories or impressions.
“These are fraudsters,” Barron said on the X video. “What they are doing is making money off of these things because they can monetize them through ads.”
The problem of deepfake videos is getting more attention, particularly from Congress. Recently, U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minnesota, addressed a deepfake video that went viral last month that showed her likeness criticizing actress Sydney Sweeney’s “great jeans” ad campaign.
The video had garnered more than a million views when she spotted it online. The false video used footage from a hearing Klobuchar participated in to make it look real.
“That’s when I heard my voice — but certainly not me — spewing a vulgar and absurd critique of an ad campaign for jeans featuring Sydney Sweeney,” Klobuchar said, according to a story in The Hill, referring to the controversial American Eagle ad campaign.
The clip migrated to other platforms. Klobuchar said the social media platform X refused to take it down or label it, while TikTok removed it and Meta labeled it as artificial intelligence.
Friends, I’d like to talk to you about a problem that has become increasingly difficult—namely, the ridiculous AI-generated videos that impersonate me on social media. pic.twitter.com/8iguoozPbk
— Bishop Robert Barron (@BishopBarron) August 20, 2025
In a New York Times op-ed, Klobuchar called on Congress to pass legislation to protect Americans from the harms of deepfakes, saying the issue demands urgent action amid the proliferation of AI technology.
Barron, who has 3.1 million followers on Facebook and 1.6 million on YouTube, told his audience that the fake videos are “not harmless fun.”
“It’s doing damage to my reputation, but also damage to people who are being defrauded,” Barron said.
Barron recommended that people not watch such videos. He also urged them to look for signs that mark Word on Fire content as legitimate, such as the blue check mark next to his X profile. He also urged viewers to use their common sense.
“When you see these goofy images that are obviously generated by a computer and you hear me talking about some wild thing, I hope you have the sense to know, ‘look, that’s not really the bishop speaking,’” Barron said.
In the Hill article, Klobuchar said that her experience was not as grave as those posed by other deepfakes and highlighted the example of someone using AI to pretend to be Secretary of State Marco Rubio contacting various high-level government officials.
Klobuchar said her bipartisan legislation would give people control over their images, as well as the right to demand that social media remove deepfakes of their voice and likeness. It would make exceptions for speech protected by the First Amendment, she said.
“The internet has an endless appetite for flashy, controversial content that stokes anger,” she said. “The people who create these videos aren’t going to stop at Sydney Sweeney’s jeans.”
Matthew Stolle has been a Post Bulletin reporter since 2000 and covered many of the beats that make up a newsroom. In his first several years, he covered K-12 education and higher education in Rochester before shifting to politics. He has also been a features writer. Today, Matt jumps from beat to beat, depending on what his editor and the Rochester area are producing in terms of news. Readers can reach Matthew at 507-281-7415 or mstolle@postbulletin.com.
