A video showing a man petting a tiger on the street and offering the wildcat to drink from a bottle is being shared on the internet as a recent incident from Madhya Pradesh's Pench area.
What have users said?: The post's caption identified the man as one Raju Patel, a 52-year-old labourer, who was in an inebriated state and was seen petting a wildcat. It further said that the man remained unharmed after the incident.
What are the facts?: Multiple Artificial Intelligence (AI) detection tools show that the viral video has been AI-generated.
Additionally, Rajneesh Singh, the deputy director of Pench Tiger Reserve, dismissed the video as fake and told a media outlet that it was not on a road within the reserve.
How did we find that out?: We conducted a simple keyword search with the words "pench tiger" and came across a news report published by a media outlet named The Sootr.
The report said that Singh, deputy director of the Pench Tiger Reserve, dismissed the video as fake.
He told the media outlet that the video was not on a road within the reserve, but could be from somewhere else.
Singh further said that such a situation could never occur with a tiger unless it was a pet.
What did detection tools show?: Team WebQoof passed the viral clip through a tool named 'DeepFake-O-Meter' to further verify its authenticity.
Three detectors of the tool showed conclusive results of the video being an AI-generated one and that it did not show depict real visuals.
DAU's analysis: We reached out to Misinformation Combat Alliance's (now known as Trusted Information Alliance) Deepfakes Analysis Unit (DAU), which ran the video through other detectors.
A tool named 'Is It AI?' showed a similar result, which classified the video as AI-generated.
The DAU also ran keyframes from the viral video on another tool called 'WasItAI', which showed that it was created by AI.
(Swipe right to view all screenshots.)
Conclusion: It is evident that the video was AI-generated and did not show real visuals.
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