A video which purportedly shows a leopard running inside a shopping mall and knocking over dustbins while trying to get around is being shared on social media.
The claim: The video is being shared to claim that it shows a leopard running around Korum Mall in Thane, Maharashtra.
Some users have also shared it as a video from a mall in Gurugram, Lucknow's LULU mall, and Mumbai's Phoenix Mall.
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 and here.)
Is it true?: No, the video has been created using Artificial Intelligence (AI).
How do we know?: We ran a reverse image search using Google Lens, which led us to several social media posts sharing this video, including an Instagram account called 'AI Kalakaar'.
Sharing it on 15 October, which was the oldest iteration of the video, the caption shared a story about the leopard and mentioned 'Higgsfield.ai' and OpenAI's text-to-video tool, Sora 2.
We saw that the account regularly shared AI-generated videos, and calls itself an 'AI Filmmaker'.
At one point in the video, the leopard appears to run through a man and a dustbin, we also ran it through Hive Moderation's AI-generated content detection tool.
It showed a 99.8 percent certainty of the video being "likely to contain AI-generated or deepfake content."
Was a leopard spotted at Korum mall?: Yes, a leopard did in fact enter Thane's Korum Mall, but in 2019.
Several news organisations reported on the bizarre incident of a leopard entering Korum mall's basement on 20 February 2019, including Hindustan Times, NDTV and The Times of India.
They said that the leopard was successfully and safely captured after a five-hour long operation involving officials from the fire department, the forest department, and the Sanjay Gandhi National Park.
Conclusion: An AI-generated video is being shared to falsely claim that it shows a real, recent incident of a leopard entering a mall.
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