How did we know the truth?: We notice that between the first two and third marks of the video, a gun suddenly appears in the woman’s hand, with no sign that she took it from anywhere.
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A simple keyword search for the term “woman shoots at harasser” did not yield reliable results regarding such incidents.
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After using Google’s reverse image search and carefully examining the posts that appeared, we found that the video was originally shared by a Pakistan-based Instagram account called ‘@viral_mix_daily.’
After this particular video garnered more than 4.7 million views, the account went on to share several more videos of women wearing hijabs and burqas defending themselves with pistols.
Is it AI?: When I ran this clip through Hive Moderation’s AI-generated content detector, I found that there was a 94.2 chance that the video was AI-generated.
Conclusion: An AI-generated video has gone viral after falsely claiming to show a woman opening fire on her harasser.
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