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,

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.

(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.

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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.

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

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."

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.

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.

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

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