Authors
Kushel HM is a mechanical engineer-turned-journalist, who loves all things football, tennis and films. He was with the news desk at the Hindustan Times, Mumbai, before joining Newschecker.
Pankaj Menon is a fact-checker based out of Delhi who enjoys ‘digital sleuthing’ and calling out misinformation. He has completed his MA in International Relations from Madras University and has worked with organisations like NDTV, Times Now and Deccan Chronicle online in the past.
Claim
Video of Mount Kailash in Tibet, surrounded by stunning lenticular clouds.
Billionaire industrialist Anand Mahindra shared the seven-second video with an inspirational post on X, which has clocked 771.2K views so far.
Fact
Newschecker noticed the extra smooth edges of the mountain and the lack of detail in the surrounding area and clouds, raising our doubts on whether it was AI-generated.
We ran the video past Hive Moderation, an AI content-detection tool, which stated that the video is “98.5% likely to contain AI-generated or deepfake content”.
We then ran a reverse image search of keyframes of the video, which led us to the same video on Instagram, shared by a page, ‘kailashenergy’, on June 28, 2024.
A further search led us to this Mashable article sharing the same post, dated November 11, 2024, stating that the video was made on AI-powered art generator Midjourney by Tibet-based graphic artists Sonam and Namgyal, who got the tool to generate lenticular clouds around the peak. We have reached out to the people behind the Instagram page and will update this copy once we receive a response.
Result: Altered Media
Sources
Hive Moderation tool
The Mashable article, November 11, 2024
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Authors
Kushel HM is a mechanical engineer-turned-journalist, who loves all things football, tennis and films. He was with the news desk at the Hindustan Times, Mumbai, before joining Newschecker.
Pankaj Menon is a fact-checker based out of Delhi who enjoys ‘digital sleuthing’ and calling out misinformation. He has completed his MA in International Relations from Madras University and has worked with organisations like NDTV, Times Now and Deccan Chronicle online in the past.
