Fact-Check: This Clip of an Elephant Being Rescued From a Cliff Is Not Real!

There are some inconsistencies in the video which point towards it being an AI-generated video,

This is not a real video of an elephant being rescued.

(Source: YouTube/Altered by The Quint)

A video of an elephant, stranded on a cliffside, being rescued with the help of an excavator as people watch, is being shared on social media platforms.

The claim: Some of the users sharing the clip have claimed that it shows the US police rescuing the elephant from a tricky situation, while others questioned how the elephant got stranded on a cliff in the first place.

An archived version of this post can be seen here.

(Source: X/Screenshot)

(Archived versions of more claims with this video can be found here, here, and here.)

Is it true?: No, the video is not real and was likely created using Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools.

How did we find out the truth?: We noticed some inconsistencies in the visuals.

At one point in the clip, the elephant has two tails.

The elephant has two tails.

(Source: YouTube/Altered by The Quint)

Some parts of the excavator, such as the cylinder and the bucket, also seem to vary through the video.

The equipment is inconsistent.

(Source: YouTube/Altered by The Quint)

News reports: We ran a keyword search with the term 'elephant rescued from cliff', but it did not return any credible articles about such an incident.

The source: We divided the video into multiple keyframes using InVID, a video verification extension on Google Chrome, and ran a reverse image search on one of them.

It led us to a YouTube video on a channel called 'AThing Inside', which had shared it on 2 October 2024.

The video's description mentioned that it contained "altered or synthetic content."

The video may not be an authentic one.

(Source: YouTube/Altered by The Quint)

We noticed that the channel had posted several videos which showed humans and animals in various strange situations, such as a dog catching cockroaches underwater or a horse with an elephant-like trunk.

The channel shared several strange videos,

(Source: YouTube/Screenshot)

Is it AI?: We ran the video through Hive AI's tool, which found that there was a 99.7 percent likelihood of the video contained AI-generated content.

It was nearly certain that the video was AI-generated.

(Source: Hive Moderation/Screenshot)

Conclusion: The video does not show a real rescue operation, it is an AI-generated video.

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