Lighthouse Journalism came across a few posts that shared small videos of non-existent creatures as real. The post claimed that the animal seen in the picture was real and called an ocean cow, a ‘samudri gaay‘ in Hindi. Other posts included a similar video of a crowd gathered to see a rare animal, a tiger in the form of a fish. During the investigation we found that both these animals were AI generated and did not exist.
Claim:
X user @RoyalRajputUp16 shared the viral video on his profile.
Check the archive version of the post here.
Other users too are sharing the video with similar claim
Another video of an AI generated tiger is also being widely shared.
Investigation:
We first started the investigation by observing the videos. In the first video among the crowd, a guy can be seen with three legs, which suggests that the video is AI generated.
During the investigation we searched on Twitter using a keyword search, mostly as ‘Which is this animal?’.
Through this we found a post that stated these videos to be fake.
While checking the profile we found that Arojinle is a wildlife researcher.
We also checked the second video of the AI-made tiger, here again we found a few anomalies.
A person’s shoes can be seen merging with each other.
We then ran the screenshots of these videos on AI detectors.
We found that the first video to surface of the AI made cow was made artificially.
The second image of the tiger too was found to be made artificially when we ran it through Maybe’s AI detector.
Conclusion: Viral videos showing non-existent water animals in the form of a cow and a tiger are generated using AI. Viral videos are fake.
