A viral video (here, here, and here) on social media features Tesla founder Elon Musk getting his haircut done by a robot. Users are sharing it with a claim that, by doing so, Elon Musk has given a message to the world that such technology is going to kill the jobs of many professionals. We fact-check this claim through this article.
Claim: Video of Elon Musk getting a haircut from a robot.
Fact: This video does not depict a real-life incident. It is an AI-generated video. Hence, the claim made in the post is False.
To check the authenticity of the viral claim, we searched the internet using relevant keywords. This search did not yield any credible information about Elon Musk participating in such activity. We also found no credible news reports featuring this video. We also went through the ‘X’ profile of Elon Musk to see if he had uploaded this video but did not find it there.
During this process, we looked at the viral footage carefully and found a few inconsistencies commonly prevalent in visuals generated by AI tools. For instance, the hair never gets cut when the robot cuts it with scissors, and Elon’s fingers look zany most of the time as if his hands have multiple fingers. This made us suspect the video may have been created using CGI/ VFX.
To find out more about the viral video, we performed a reverse image search on the internet using a few keyframes from the video. This search led us to an instagram post (archive link) that contained the same video.
It was uploaded by a page named ‘aismartzone’ on 17 December 2024. It is mentioned in the description of this post that this video is not real and that it is a CGI video created with the help of AI tools.
Additionally, we found many AI-generated videos on the ‘aismartzone’ page, which makes it clear that social media users have taken the video from this page and shared it with a claim that it depicts a real incident.
To sum up, an AI-generated video is falsely shared as real visuals of Elon Musk getting a haircut from a robot.
