Fact Check: Video Of Wildfire Burning In Hollywood Is NOT Real -- AI Generated Scenes

Fact Check

  • by: Sarah Thompson
Fact Check: Video Of Wildfire Burning In Hollywood Is NOT Real -- AI Generated Scenes AI Generated

Does a video show real wildfire scenes of firefighters in rugged terrain, fire raging and a suburban neighborhood in California? No, that's not true: This video on Facebook is AI generated. Lead Stories tracked the source of a clip in this video back to a TikTok creator who has their account marked, "AI Lover." They have published 69 AI generated fire videos from January 11, 2025, to this writing -- adding 31 of them to a "Wildfire in Los Angeles" playlist.

The video appears in a reel (archived here) published on Facebook on January 13, 2025. The post is captioned:

wildfires in los Angeles California right now omg 😱 wildfires in los Angeles California united states today omg Hollywood is burning city #fire #wildfire #storm #losangeles #california #usaus #news

A blue textbox overlay reads:

fire continues to burn everything omg 😱😢

This is what the post looked like on Facebook at the time of writing:

quotescape.jpg

(Source: Facebook screenshot taken on Wed Jan 15 16:44:58 2025 UTC)

The opening scene of the video shows deer fleeing from a fire on a steep hillside (pictured above). In the distance beyond the hills is a burning city skyline. The January 2025 wildfires had not burned the central business district of Los Angeles (Cal Fire map archived here) as of January 15, 2025. Another clip in the video shows a scene of a suburban neighborhood burning (pictured below). The layout of the neighborhood, with all the homes facing the same direction, is improbable -- this would require more streets than practical.

A reverse image search with Google Lens found a match for this scene posted on YouTube on January 13, 2025 (pictured below right). The last five seconds in the 13-second-long video show the scene of the neighborhood.

silentmakil01.jpg

(Source: Lead Stories composite image with Facebook and YouTube screenshots taken on Wed Jan 15 17:59:23 2025 UTC)

A TikTok watermark is visible in the YouTube clip -- @silent.malik05 (archived here). This TikTok account, labeled "AI Lover," is up, but the video of the burning neighborhood does not appear in the thumbnail previews (pictured below). This account has published at least 69 AI-generated fire videos since January 11, 2025 -- adding 31 of them to a "Wildfire in Los Angeles" playlist. Many of the videos appear to be variations on a theme, as if a text prompt to an AI video generator was reworded.

silentmalik05.jpg

(Source: TikTok screenshot taken on Wed Jan 15 18:55:31 2025 UTC)

Additionally, Lead Stories took four still screenshots from the Facebook reel and tested them with the AI generated content detection tool of hivemoderation.com. The results pictured in the composite image below were varied, ranging from 62 percent to 99.1 percent likely to contain AI generated content.

firehive.jpg

(Source: Lead Stories composite image with hivemoderation.com screenshots taken on Wed Jan 15 19:06:28 2025 UTC)

Other Lead Stories fact checks of claims surrounding the January 2025 Los Angeles wildfires are here.

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  Sarah Thompson

Sarah Thompson lives with her family and pets on a small farm in Indiana. She founded a Facebook page and a blog called “Exploiting the Niche” in 2017 to help others learn about manipulative tactics and avoid scams on social media. Since then she has collaborated with journalists in the USA, Canada and Australia and since December 2019 she works as a Social Media Authenticity Analyst at Lead Stories.


 

Read more about or contact Sarah Thompson

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