AI-generated videos of Hurricane Melissa flood social media • FRANCE 24 English

AI-generated videos of Hurricane Melissa flood social media • FRANCE 24 English

We stay with this story for truth or fake. If you’ve opened um online platforms such as Tik Tok or X in the last 48 hours or so, you may have seen fake photos, fake videos of the effect of Hurricane Melissa, which prompted official warnings from authorities in Jamaica. Well, Emerald Maxwell joins us over by the big board to help us sort uh as you could say, the wheat from the chaff or from the AI slop. Go ahead, Max. Go ahead, Emerald. Yes. Well, as Hurricane Melissa was uh approaching and then blasting across the Caribbean, there has been a veritable flood of fake videos and AI generated content uh on social media from fake news reports to videos showing uh sharks apparently swimming around Jamaica, some of which are really quite realistic. Exhibit A, this photo which purports to show uh the damage from Hurricane Melissa in Black River, Jamaica. Uh there’s no indication at all that this is fake, apart from, if you’re really paying attention, the time stamp on it. It shows it was posted 4 hours before the storm hit at 1 p.m. on October 28th. But of course, that could be easily missed if, like this photo, it’s been posted and reposted a million times in lots of different places. Another way of the other way of knowing if it’s real is by running it through an AI detection tool like fact checkers at lead uh lead stories did um using the hive moderation tool and as the screenshot shows they found that the image was 99.8% likely AI generated. This video meanwhile purports to show the eye of the storm uh seen from above 30,000 ft above uh Hurricane Melissa. But yet again, it does look real, but it is AI generated. As a helpful community note points out on X right here, it also points us to the uh American weather ay’s website that explains that cyclones in the northern hemisphere uh in the in of the world move in counterclockwise direction away from the center of storm whereas they move in clockwise in the southern hemisphere. For comparison’s sake, here is a real video of the hurricane which was taken by a US Air Force Reserve crew known as the hurricane hunters who flew through the flew through the eye of Melissa on Monday to collect data for the National Hurricane Center. They do look quite similar, has to be said. Social media users may also have come across alarming videos like these, which shows apparently swimming around flooded uh Jamaican streets or in um or in swimming pools apparently take brought in by the surge. Um they these racked of hundreds of thousands of views on Tik Tok and appeared among the top search results for Hurricane Melissa. If we take a closer look at this video though, we can see telltel sign. There’s a blur, a blurry uh mark that’s been sort of hidden and that indicates that it’s AI. To the casual scroller, these watermarks may be hard to detect. Uh but they are the first thing to look for when you’re looking when you’re trying to decide if a video is real or not. uh the watermarks of open AAI’s text to video tool Sora and the AI developed by Google VO such as this one um which was shared uh where we see it’s a rather humorous video we see uh some men hanging out having a smoke with some dolphins apparently in the middle of the storm we can see uh it’s probably not one that you’re necessarily going to believe anyway but we can see here the watermark Sora other times though there are attempts to mask this watermark like this fake news clip which purports to show a reporter uh filming in the middle of the storm in the Jamaican capital Kingston but it is also AI. He has attempt to hide the sora mark with a like and follow. All of this is pretty harmless, you might think, but comments on these posts indicate that people are really falling for it and prompted authorities in Jamaica to warn people to listen only to official information because as this article by RFI explains, uh, some of these videos uh cause people to underestimate the danger and take and take risks they wouldn’t. Usually, this viral content clutters social media and it drowns out real safety messages. On Tuesday, Tik Tok, on which most of these fake videos are circulating, did take some down after this report by AFP, but most do continue to be available across uh social media platforms. Mark, everyone Maxwell, thank you very much indeed. As you say, it’s all quite funny until it isn’t, isn’t it? There you go. the uh things to look out

From shark videos to news reports – AI is taking fake disaster content to a new level. If you have opened TikTok or X in the past 48 hours you may well have seen AI-generated photos and videos of Hurricane Melissa, as the storm blasted across the Caribbean. The flood of disinformation prompted Jamaican authorities to issue warnings. Emerald Maxwell takes a look in this edition of Truth or Fake.
#HurricaneMelissa #AI #fakecontent

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