Balint Pastor takes legal action over AI photomontage

Balint Pastor, president of the Alliance of Vojvodina Hungarians (SVM), has initiated legal action against the Vojvodina Hungarian Plenum following the spread of an AI-generated photomontage on social media. The manipulated image depicts Pastor and a party colleague bowing before a photograph of Ratko Mladić, a convicted war criminal.

Pastor stated that the image is a fake created with artificial intelligence and asserted, “I would never bow my head to convicted war criminals, not even for any political interest.” He accused the Plenum of attempting to deceive the public through realistic false content.

The controversy stems from a session of the Novi Sad City Assembly, where SVM official Gyula Kiss voted in favor of a minute of silence to honor Mladić. While Kiss and other officials described the vote as a personal moral decision rather than an official party stance, the Plenum questioned whether the SVM leadership had crossed a moral red line.