This viral video showing a cloudburst is AI-generated
A video (here, here, here and here) has gone viral on social media showing water suddenly gushing down a street, with claims that it is real footage of a cloudburst. Let’s check the truth behind this video.
Claim: The viral video shows real footage of a cloudburst.
Fact: The video is not real. It shows several inconsistencies, and the original video was uploaded on an Instagram page with a mention that it was AI-created. The administrator of the page also confirmed it was made using RunwayML. Moreover, the AI-detection tool Hive flagged it as 99.6% AI-generated. Hence, the claim is FALSE.
On closely examining the video, we can spot several inconsistencies, for example, a person suddenly appearing and disappearing. Such glitches are common in AI-generated visuals (here and here), indicating that this video is likely created using AI and not real footage of a cloudburst.
To find the truth, we conducted a reverse image search of keyframes from the viral video, which led us to the same video uploaded on 05 August 2025 by an Instagram page named ‘kandha_odysseys_vines’. In the video description, it was mentioned that the clip was created using Artificial Intelligence (AI) and VFX.
To get more details about the video, we contacted the administrator of the Instagram page, who clarified that the video was created using an AI tool called RunwayML.
To verify whether the video was AI-generated or a deepfake, we ran it through AI-detecting tools like Hive, which showed a 99.6% likelihood of being AI-generated. This confirms that the video does not show real footage of a cloudburst but is artificially created.
To sum up, the viral video of a cloudburst is AI-generated and not real footage.