Do various video clips in a social media post show authentic footage of the Los Angeles County wildfires burning in January 2025? No, that's not true: These clips show evidence of being generated by artificial intelligence. We could not locate any trustworthy sources that used the clips or established their authenticity.
The claim appeared in a post (archived here) published on X on January 12, 2025. The post was a reply to a post made on the official X account of noted conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who was discussing the California wildfires. The reply in question included a compilation of clips showing a landscape burning and a caption that read:
It's surreal the magnitude of it all and it's not going to stop anytime soon.!
This is what the post looked like on X at the time of writing:
(Source: X screenshot taken on Mon Jan 13 16:00:00 2025 UTC)
No credible instances of the footage
Lead Stories took screenshots of three clips used in the compilation video. These clips were found at the 0:00-mark, 0:05-mark and 0:25-mark of the video, respectively. These screenshots are shown below to demonstrate the possible AI-generated origin of the video.
Lead Stories used Google Images (here, here and here), TinEye (here, here and here), Bing (here, here and here) and Yandex (here, here and here) to conduct reverse-image searches for those three screenshots. However, if the searches returned any exact matches, those results were limited to social media posts or spam websites, not reputable news organizations.
AI-generated clips
Lead Stories ran the same screenshots (here, here and here) and the entire video (here) through TrueMedia.org's AI detector. All three images and the video were labeled "Uncertain" regarding their authenticity because the detector "didn't identify any faces." However, two screenshots and the video showed "Substantial Evidence" of generative AI being a part of their creation.
Additionally, there are some telltale signs that the clips are AI-generated. For example, the clips are low quality and show poor visibility of what is happening. The clips with police cars show no legible license plates or other text. There is also a noticeable absence of humans in the clips, with no depictions of emergency responders attempting to put out the flames or residents evacuating. These discrepancies are shown in the graphic below:
(Source: Lead Stories graphic of video compilation screenshots created on Mon Jan 13 2025 UTC)
No news reports of fires in downtown Los Angeles
Although several fires burned in Los Angeles County starting on January 7, 2025, the fires had not reached downtown Los Angeles at the time of writing, as some of the clips in the compilation video suggest. According to data compiled by NBC News (archived here), CNN (archived here) and The New York Times (archived here), there was no indication that downtown Los Angeles is on fire as of the time of writing.
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Other Lead Stories fact checks of claims related to the Los Angeles County fires can be found here.
