A video (here, here, and here) showing a lion casually walking into a supermarket and feeding on meat is going viral on social media, with users claiming it captures a real incident from South Africa. We will fact-check this claim through this article.
Claim: The video shows a lion entering a store in South Africa and eating meat.
Fact: The video is AI-generated and does not depict a real incident. Hence, the claim made in the post is False.
To verify the authenticity of the viral clip, we first closely examined the footage and noticed multiple visual inconsistencies commonly associated with AI-generated content.
For instance, the lion’s tail disappears briefly in some frames, and at one point, an extra tail appears momentarily. These visual glitches raised initial suspicion about the video’s authenticity.
To confirm our doubts, we ran the video through AI-detection platforms like Hive and Cantilux. Both tools flagged the clip as highly likely to be AI-generated (here and here).
We also noticed a watermark reading “@ataquesferoz” on the video. A keyword search led us to the original post on TikTok by the user @ataquesferoz. The creator labelled the video as “AI-generated”, confirming that the visuals were not real but artificially produced. This account contains many similar AI-generated videos.
Additionally, we searched for any credible news reports about a lion walking into a store or supermarket in South Africa but found no such incidents reported by local or international media.
To sum up, an AI-generated video of a lion in a supermarket is being shared as a real event from South Africa.
