Did a Japanese Man Surgically Transform Himself Into a Dog? No, This Is AI!

The video is an AI-generated one and does not show a real person who got surgery to transform into a dog.

A video showing what appears to be a distorted, heavily tattooed dog, has gone viral on the internet.

The claim: The video is being shared to claim that a Japanese man, identified as 'Toco', spent nearly 12 lakh rupees to surgically transform himself into a dog.

The Quint also received a query to verify this claim on its WhatsApp tipline.

(Archived versions of more posts sharing this claim can be seen here, here, and here.)

Is it true?: No, the video is an AI-generated one and is not real.

• While there is a man in Japan who went viral for making a hyperrealistic costume of a dog, he did not get any surgery to resemble one.

How did we find out the truth?: We ran keyword search with the term 'Japan man surgery to look like dog', but did not find any credible reports related to any body doing this.

• Supplementing the search with 'Toco', the name mentioned in the claim, led us to news reports from 2023.

• One of these was a video report by WION, which said that a Japanese man, Toco, had spent around 14,000 US dollars (approximately 13 lakh rupees), for a costume which closely resembled a border collie.

• A report by British news organisation The Independent said that Toco got the costume made because he had dreamt of "transforming into a dog since he was a child."

• China's South China Morning Post had also shared a video of Toco and his border collie costume, in which he could be seen rolling around and playing like a dog.

None of these reports made any mention of Toco getting surgeries, categorically stating that it was a costume.

Is it AI?: We then ran a reverse image search on the viral video. This too, did not yield any credible or reliable sources sharing the video in the claim.

• However, we noticed some visual discrepancies in the clip, such as the snout and mouth of the 'dog' changing appearance at different points in the video.

Additionally, the 'dog' appears to have both ears at the beginning of the video, but one of them vanishes as the video progresses.

• Since there was no evidence of the visuals being authentic, we shared the video with the Deepfakes Analysis Unit (DAU) to check for AI.

• Imagewhisperer's tool analysed the clip using eight detectors and found that the video was AI-generated.

• Similarly, AI or Not's detector also found the video to be an AI-generated one. (Swipe)

Conclusion: An AI-generated video has gone viral with the false claim that it shows Toco, a Japanese man, who spent nearly 12 lakh rupees to surgically transform himself into a dog.

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