Mail hoodwinked by Saudi pie in the sky

“How 50 MILLION people were fooled by a Saudi Arabia World Cup skyscraper stadium video that turned out to be an AI hoax, cost 35p to create and was made in two minutes by a man in bed on his phone,” ran a breathless headline on the Daily Mail’s website on October 30.

The paper reported how a video of the world’s first so-called “skyscraper stadium” in Saudi Arabia had gone went viral on social media, gaining more than 50 million views “and coverage from news outlets across the globe”

The video showed a design of the Gulf state’s Neom Sky Stadium, announced last year, which is reported to sit 1,000 feet above ground level, boast a capacity of 46,000 and be one of the venues for the 2034 World Cup, which is being hosted by Saudi Arabia.

“But the incredible video they were watching was not the elaborate work of Saudi Arabia, or the company funding the stadium, at all,” the Mail went on. “No, it was made in just two minutes a couple of weeks earlier by 34-year-old Liam Hawes, from East Sussex, as he settled down for a good night’s sleep in bed.”

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It also quoted the AI prankster as saying: “It took literally a couple of minutes to put together. Probably two or three minutes and suddenly people think it’s an official Saudi Arabian concept. The video cost about 35p to make and I did it on my phone.”

Alas, space constraints, presumably, meant the Mail could not mention any of the “news outlets across the globe” which had been taken in by the video.

One of them ran it under the headline “Football’s first SKYSCRAPER stadium? Design for Saudi Arabia’s 46,000-seat World Cup venue, 1,000ft up in the air, emerges – but major questions remain” and reported how “works on the Neom Sky Stadium are expected to begin in 2027 and be completed in 2032, two years before the tournament begins”.

That news outlet, of course, was the Mail – and one might have thought sports reporter Gethin Hicks, who revealed the hoax, might have known, given he also wrote the original report.