mimesis
Forensic comparison of videos, pictures and transcripts: what is the same, what was cut, and who posted it first. Every test is published before it runs, so nobody can move the goalposts afterwards.
What it was made for
Mimesis is Greek for imitation. The toolkit was started in June 2025 for one job: Tim Ballard tells the same story again and again, and we wanted to line the tellings up, word for word.
The first run compared four tellings of his border-wall story: White House video of him telling it at a Feb 1, 2019 meeting, which was going round again in 2025, against three texts from 2019:
- his Deseret News op-ed, Feb 4, 2019: “I’ve fought sex trafficking at the border. This is why we need a wall”
- his Fox News op-ed: “I’ve fought sex trafficking as a DHS special agent. We need to build the wall for the children”
- the official transcript of that same meeting (transcript, The American Presidency Project)
Whisper transcribes the video, the articles’ text is pulled from the page, and the versions are set side by side: what stays, what changes, what gets cut. The first script is still in the history: compare_sources.py, June 25, 2025.
Cases
Holy Holiday for Weirdos in Utah run 1: Ep 388 not the source
A Sep 16, 2026 Instagram reaction post, the odd join in the ldsabuse network, carries 1:12 of Candace Owens in two different settings. John's call: both come from one episode of hers, the same day. Rules fixed before the episode is downloaded.
The Bracket John’s call: holds (see note)
The first job, run again with every input saved and hashed first. The official transcript of the Feb 1, 2019 White House meeting skips the middle of his remarks. The video of the same meeting has it, Mexicali boy and wall and all.
The ldsabuse Twins published
Six times in four weeks, the same video landed on X @ldsabuse and Instagram ldsabuseonx, 1 to 30 minutes apart. A forensic file and metadata comparison.
- B7 and the Lettering of the Twin Structure
- Left or right: pre-registration · run 1 result: no match
- Round 3: provenance (T5, Grok's test) pre-registered
How many of the 5 posts are Gen-AI fakes? open
@timballard89's five Instagram posts of Oct 7, 2026. Predictions and decision rules were locked before anything runs; results go below them, and the pre-registration stays unchanged.
How we work
Inputs are hashed and published with the code and the decision rule; the commit time is the timestamp. Then the published command runs, word for word, and the result goes in its own file. The code is in the mimesis repository.