Lighthouse Journalism came across a video that was being widely shared on social media platforms, showing what appeared to be a dramatic rescue. An elephant lifting a child who had allegedly fallen into its enclosure at a zoo. The clip was being circulated with claims that the incident was real and had taken place recently.
However, after a detailed investigation, Lighthouse Journalism found that the video was not genuine. It was created using artificial intelligence (AI), and no such rescue took place in any zoo.
Claim:
Instagram user Shrawan Choudhary shared the viral video on his profile.
Other users are also sharing the same video with similar claim.
Investigation:
We first ran a Google keyword search and checked if any such incident had happened recently. We could not find credible news reports about the same.
We found this video uploaded on a YouTube channel, Funfact1min, on July 18.
The tag on the video suggested that the content was either synthetic or altered.
There were several such videos posted by the user.
We then uploaded the video in an AI detector.
HIVE Moderation suggested a 99.9 % probability that the video is AI-generated.
Conclusion: The widely shared video of an elephant in a zoo rescuing a child is not real; it is AI-generated. The viral video is fake.
