A video (here, here, here and here) is going viral on social media showing an elephant and a baby elephant walking down a street, where the baby elephant is seen picking up a discarded tin and dropping it into a waste bin. The video is being shared as a real incident. Let’s find out the truth behind it.
Claim: The viral video shows a baby elephant picking up a tin from the road and dropping it into a dustbin, showcasing real-life environmental awareness.
Fact: The video is AI-generated. Visual inconsistencies like distorted text, unnatural object movements, and transparent human figures indicate manipulation. AI detection tools also detected a 99.4% probability that the video contains AI-generated or deepfake elements. Hence the claim is FALSE.
When we closely watch the video, several inconsistencies become noticeable—common signs of AI-generated or deepfake content (here and here). For example, when the baby elephant spots the tin, it initially appears normal, but as the elephant picks it up, the shape of the tin changes unnaturally. At one point, the tin doesn’t appear to be held by the trunk but rather looks like it’s stuck to it. In another scene, the trash bin has ‘USE ME’ written on it, but after the tin is dropped inside, the text oddly changes to ‘NBE ME’. Additionally, the walking style of the people in the background looks unnatural, and one person even appears to have a transparent body. All these elements suggest that the video is AI-generated.
To further verify if the video was AI-generated, we ran it through Hive’s detection tool, which showed a 99.4% likelihood of AI-generated or deepfake content. While we couldn’t trace the origin of the video, the available evidence strongly indicates that it is AI-generated.
To sum up, the video of a baby elephant dropping a tin into a dustbin is AI-generated.
