Did scientists make a "terrifying new discovery" about the disappearance of Malaysian Airlines Flight 370, a mystery that has been unsolved since the plane vanished on March 8, 2014? No, that's not true: At the time of writing on May 29, 2024, there was no "terrifying new discovery" regarding the search for the missing Malaysian Airlines Flight 370. An image of a submerged plane in a social media post making the claim showed signs of being generated with AI while another image appears to be from a movie set.
There was recent news that appeared on May 27, 2024, regarding a "technology professional" in the U.K. who believes he may have spotted wreckage in a Cambodian jungle using Google Maps. His discovery is not terrifying, and as of yet has not been confirmed to be Malaysian Airlines Flight 370.
The claim appeared in a post (archived here) on Facebook by the page Mystical World on May 23, 2024. The post has this caption and hashtags:
Breaking: Scientists Terrifying New Discovery Of Malaysian Flight 370!Details below in the comments section...
This is what the post looked like on Facebook at the time of writing:
(Source: Facebook screenshot taken on Wed May 29 15:52:50 2024 UTC)
March 8, 2024, marked the 10-year anniversary of the disappearance of Malaysian Airlines Flight 370. A review of what is known was published by The Associated Press on March 5, 2024. There were no new discoveries included in this summary. Several pieces of debris from the plane washed ashore in 2015 and 2016. The search has been suspended since 2017.
This first comment under the Facebook post contains a link to an article published on the website tintinhthanh.online on May 20, 2024. The article has an embedded February 1, 2024, video from the YouTube channel Top Discovery titled, "Scientists Terrifying New Discovery Of Malaysian Flight 370!" The video is 26:15 minutes long. The video is a compilation of production footage from several documentary sources that are noted in the upper left corner of the screen; "60 Minutes Australia," "Investigations Et Enquetes," "Random Thoughts," National Geographic and more. The video has a computer-generated voiceover that reviews some of the facts and theories about Flight 370's mysterious disappearance but the video does not introduce any new or terrifying discovery made by scientists.
The caption with the YouTube video contains this disclaimer:
The content presented in our videos is intended solely for entertainment purposes. While we may draw upon facts, rumors, and fiction, viewers should not interpret any part of the content as factual or definitive information. Please enjoy responsibly.
The main Facebook post contains images of two submerged plane wrecks and one clearly fabricated image of skeletal remains of passengers sitting upright in the cabin of a submerged plane. None of these show a real scene of scientists exploring the wreckage of Flight 370. One image is AI-generated and the other shows an underwater movie set. The blue-tinted image of scuba divers exploring the algae-covered airplane (pictured below) was determined by the Hive Moderation AI Generated Content Detection tool to be 99.9 percent likely to be AI-generated.
(Source: hivemoderation.com screenshot taken on Wed May 29 21:31:10 2024 UTC)
The lower, black and white image in the claim was posted to the photo sharing platform Flickr on December 29, 2008. The photo is captioned:
Into the Blue
Mehgan: H20 Stunt double Jessica Alba and Ashley Scott
Underwater set, ocean
Bahamas
The text of the tintinhthanh.online article is peppered with homoglyphs -- these are characters, or glyphs, that may appear identical but are not the same letter. Homoglyphs are frequently used to evade plagiarism detection or to make a website url appear to be a familiar and trusted brand when it actually directs to a malicious site.
It seems that homoglyphs also can disguise AI-generated writing. Lead Stories copied the text with the homoglyphs into the Hive Moderation AI Generated Content Detection tool (pictured below left) and the tool rated this as 0.0 percent not AI-Generated. Lead Stories then used Google Lens to "read" a screenshot of the adulterated text, which effectively replaced the homoglyphs with the letters they resemble. A copy of the corrected text was then input into the Hive tool (pictured below right) and this was determined to be 100 percent, without a doubt, written by an AI.
(Source: tintinhthanh.online, Google Lens and Hive Extension screenshot taken on Wed May 29 20:22:06 2024 UTC)
A Google search for news about Flight 370 on May 29, 2024, shows that there have been several articles published in the past few days. These articles report that Ian Wilson, a U.K.-based technology professional, believes he has spotted the plane's wreckage in a Cambodian jungle using Google Maps.
A Malaysian news website, Thestar.com, published an article on May 28, 2024, titled, "Cambodia dismisses report of MH370 plane wreckage in jungle but ready to cooperate with Malaysian govt on matter at any time." This article quotes Sin Chanserivutha, spokesman and undersecretary of state for the State Secretariat of Civil Aviation in Cambodia:
The media coverage of MH370 in Cambodia is fake.
Additional Lead Stories fact checks regarding clickbait headlines that fail to deliver the promised information can be found here.
