The Ditwa cyclone has hit Sri Lanka, with many regions witnessing severe flooding. According to reports, more than 200 people are missing, around 20,000 homes have been destroyed, and nearly 108,000 people have been moved to state-run temporary shelters, as per the Disaster Management Centre. Amid this situation, several videos (here, here and here) have gone viral on social media claiming to show an elephant rescuing multiple animals such as deer, a dog and a leopard from the floodwaters. Let’s find out the truth behind these videos.
Claim: The viral video shows an elephant rescuing multiple animals from the Sri Lankan floods.
Fact: These videos are not real. The original TikTok upload was labelled as AI-generated. Besides the clips showing several inconsistencies, AI-detection tools also confirmed that the footage is artificially created. Hence, the claim is FALSE.
To find the truth, we closely examined the video and noticed several inconsistencies. For instance, when the leopard tries to climb onto the elephant, parts of its body briefly disappear, and its shape appears unnatural. In another scene, where the elephant is shown rescuing a deer, the elephant’s trunk does not properly grip the deer, yet the deer is lifted unrealistically. These visual distortions clearly indicate that the video is AI-generated.
To trace the original source of the videos, we performed a reverse image search. This led us to a TikTok post featuring the clips of the elephant rescuing the dog and the deer (here and here). The creator had clearly labelled the video as ‘AI-generated’. The account, named helpsizis, also contains several other AI-generated videos (here and here).
To verify whether the videos were AI-generated, we ran all clips through Hive’s AI detection tool, which flagged them as strongly AI-generated content (here, here and here). This, along with the other evidence we gathered, confirms that the videos are indeed AI-generated.
To sum up, these videos showing an elephant rescuing animals from the Sri Lankan floods are AI-generated.
