Two videos (here, here, here, and here) have recently gone viral on social media which show an Elephant and a Giraffe being rescued from the ledge of a mountain, respectively. We fact-check this claim through this article.
Claim: These videos depict a real animal rescue incident of rescuing Elephant & Giraffe.
Fact: Both these videos were digitally generated using AI. Hence, the claim made in the post is False.
To check the veracity of the viral videos, we performed a keyword search to check if these incidents were reported by the media anywhere around the world. However, this search did not yield any credible information about these viral claims.
Then, we performed a reverse image search on the internet using the keyframes from both videos. This search led us to the original version of the Elephant rescue video uploaded on a YouTube channel named ‘AThing Inside.’
This video was uploaded on 2 October 2024, titled ‘US police rescued an elephant stuck in a rocky mountain.’ However, in the description section of the video, there is a label that says how the content was made. It reads ‘Altered or synthetic content. Sound or visuals were significantly edited or digitally generated.’
This label is a feature given on YouTube that allows creators to disclose the usage of ‘altered or synthetic content.’ The channel that uploaded this video contains many such videos (here and here).
This makes it clear that this video does not depict a real incident but is a video created digitally. Furthermore, many hints in the video give away that the video was digitally created or created using AI. To name a few, the humans in the video move in a very robotic way; their faces look smudgy and blurry, and their hands keep changing shapes; such things are generally observed in AI-generated videos.
Also, at one point in the video, a new elephant tail props up out of nowhere. The hook of the excavator also looks different in a few shots, the texture of the mountain keeps changing in each shot.
Although we did not find the Giraffe video on this channel, we observed similar anomalies in the video, meaning this may also have been created digitally. Then, we ran both these videos through the AI content detection tool Hive Moderation. The report by Hive showed that there is a high likelihood of both videos being created by Artificial Intelligence.
To sum up, AI-generated videos are falsely being shared as actual visuals of an animal rescue operation.
