A video from what appears to be a security camera (here, here, here and here) is going viral on social media, showing a lion roaming a street at night and sniffing a man sleeping outside a shop near the road. The video is widely shared as a real incident; let’s find out the truth behind it.
Claim: The viral video shows a lion roaming the streets at night and sniffing a man sleeping outside a shop, but doing no harm.
Fact: The video is digitally created and not a real incident. It was uploaded by a Brazilian YouTube channel that specialises in AI-generated animal content, and AI detection tools have confirmed it is artificially made. Hence, the claim is FALSE.
To verify the video, we closely observed the visuals. Although some Indian letters appear on the signboards of the closed shops, the text is unreadable and the language is unrecognisable, something commonly seen in AI-generated videos.
We then performed a reverse image search, which led us to the same video on a YouTube channel from Brazil called The World of Beasts (here and here). The video was uploaded on 06 June 2025 with a title in Portuguese that translates to “Lion finds man sleeping on the street in Gujarat!!!” Moreover, the video description clearly mentions that it is edited or artificially created. The channel also states that its content is generated using AI and regularly features AI-generated videos of various animals.
Additionally, we ran the video through various AI detection tools (here and here), which indicated a 91% likelihood that the video was AI-generated. This strongly suggests that the video does not depict a real incident and is instead a digitally created piece.
To sum up, the video of a lion roaming a street and approaching a sleeping man is AI-generated and not real.
