Recently, videos (here and here) of what appears to be a new creature with the body of a seal or dolphin and the head of a cow have been making the rounds on social media. There have been numerous similar videos (here, here and here) circulating on social media of an amphibian creature that appears to be a mix of sea and land animals. In this article, we fact-check the claims.
Claim: The video shows a sea creature with the head of a cow.
fact: This is an AI-generated video. Therefore, the post claims: error.
First, I searched the internet to see if there had been any sightings of such a strange creature. This search did not produce any credible reports. This is unusual, as if such a creature had been discovered and photographed by humans, it would have been widely reported.
I also couldn't find any videos of the same creature from different angles. In the video, you can see a large group of people gathered in the background of the creature, and it's hard to believe that none of them had filmed the same thing from their own angle and posted it on the web.
We then suspected that this viral video was created using VFX or AI and investigated the footage further. We found some anomalies that are common in AI-generated content (here, here, here). If we look closely, we can see one of the people walking in the background wearing green boots. He is walking from the left of the frame towards the center. As he walks, another foot appears out of nowhere next to the boots, which cannot happen in real life. We can see the same in the image below.
Similarly, in another video (here) a tiger skin and a fish man with a head appear to be combined into a shoe.
After these videos gained attention, many social media users questioned their authenticity. Posts They claim that these videos are fake.
We also found several posts containing a sentence in Chinese that translates to “AI-generated for entertainment purposes only.”
We subsequently ran several screenshots from this viral video through our Maybe AI content detector for “Hugging Face” and found that it was 98% artificial.
We also found several Facebook profiles of “digital creators” who post numerous videos of mutated animals, which can be found here and here. From all this evidence, we can conclude that the videos generated using text-to-video AI tools are being falsely shared as real videos of strange and mysterious animals.
In other words, AI-generated videos are being shared as real-life footage of mutated animal species.
