An AI-generated video of a human-faced fish is being shared as real. - FACTLY
Sai Krishna Muthyanolla
February 2, 2024
A video allegedly showing a recently discovered fish that resembles a human face is being shared on social media. It is claimed that this fish was discovered in a lake named Samsara in the tropical region of Karanji. This lake is alleged to be one of the sources of the Nile River. Let’s check the authenticity of this claim through this article.
Claim: A human-face fish has been discovered near Lake Samsara near the Nile River.
Fact: The visuals in the viral video are AI-generated. There is no credible evidence to prove the existence of either a human-faced fish or a lake named Samsara near the Nile River. Hence, the claim made in the post is False.
To check the veracity of the viral claim, we performed a keyword search on the internet, which led us to a YouTube video uploaded on a channel named ‘Headtap Videos.’ This is the exact same video that is being shared along with the viral claim.
According to the description of this video titled ‘The Human Faced Fish”, a fish was discovered by scientists recently in an unexplored region of Karanji in a lake named ‘Lake Samsara.’ Apparently, this was named Homo Piscis, or Human-faced fish.
First of all, a keyword search on the internet revealed that there is no lake with the name of Samsara in a region named Karanji in existence. There is a lake named Karanji in Mysuru, Karnataka, India, but there are no news reports to back the viral claim that such a species has been discovered there recently.
Also, if scientists had made such a discovery, it would have been reported widely by the mainstream media, but we found no news reports or scientific articles backing this. We also did not find the name of this alleged fish species listed in the ‘Integrated Taxonomic Information System’, which contains the ‘authoritative taxonomic information on plants, animals, fungi, and microbes of North America and the world.’
Furthermore, we found that ‘Headtap Videos’, the Youtube channel which uploaded the viral video with this information, uploads such graphics-based videos. The channel’s description states-Experiments in video and Graphics. This could very well mean that the viral video was also a work of Computer Generated Imagery(CGI). Suspecting this, we ran a few screenshots from the viral clip through the Hive AI detector, which detects AI-generated images, and it showed that these visuals could have very likely been generated using AI, with chances of it being around 99.4%.
To sum up, there is no evidence that scientists have recently discovered a human-faced fish species named Homo Piscis.