Does a viral video of flood scenes include real clips of the 2025 Independence Day Weekend flooding in Kerr County, Texas? No, that's not true: The opening scene is an obvious product of generative AI. None of the clips in the montage can be traced to authentic filming of the Texas flood. The clips include news coverage of floods that happened days or even years before the Texas flood, in New Mexico, Montana and The Phillippines, India and Japan.
The video appears in a July 13 TikTok post (archived here) by the @riberdy.michelett account under the title "July 05 2025 Breaking". It opened:
At least 60 dead including 14 Childern from texas flooding pray for all
This is what the post looked like on TikTok at the time of writing:
(Source: Lead Stories screenshot of TikTok post by @riberdy.michelett account.)
Obvious generative AI fake footage
There is ample documentation of generative AI tools' failure to render hands as realistically as it creates faces and buildings and this video demonstrates the failing.
In this screenshot from the video, which is generally photographically detailed and realistic, the right hand of the man in grey is rendered only in two dimensions and the proportions of the fingers include an unusually long pinky. As the cabinet starts to move, the face of the man in black changes from photo-realistic to two dimensional.
To test our conclusion, we submitted the video to the AI detection tool at Vera.ai, a fact-checking tool creator. Its algorithms assessed that the video is 94 percent likely to be a creation of generative AI and not an authentic video recording of real-life events:
(Source: Lead Stories screenshot of webpage at www.veraai.eu.)
Non-Texas Video Clips
The TikTok video follows the opening AI clip with a montage of 12 scenes of flooding. As the chart below shows, using Google reverse image search, Lead Stories determined at least 10 were not of flooding in Texas or not of events in July 2025:
(Source: Lead Stories screenshots of TikTok, YouTube, Facebook and web page video matches arranged into chart by Lead Stories.)
Clip 1, of a kitchen flooding, cannot show the Texas flash floods as it was posted to TikTok (archived here) one month before the Texas flood, by the @M4zsda Indonesian language account that specializes in dramatic gaming video and fanciful AI monster videos.
Lead Stories was unable to confirm the place or date shown in Clip 2, of a car or truck cab filling with muddy water, but a reversed version of it appeared on the Pretty Mara Bautista Facebook page, managed from the United Arab Emirates, according to Facebook transparency listings. Facebook scam accounts sometimes flip images and videos to elude copyright violation detectors.
Clip 3, of a mall ceiling collapsing in a torrent of water, has been available for licensing since May 29, 2024 via Viral Hog, a photo agency. Credited to Christine May Belencion in Viral Hog's catalogue (archived here), it is described as a March 27, 2024 ceiling collapse at the SM City Fairview mall in Quezon City, Phillippines.
Clip 4, of cars washing down a street at night, had been online for more than three months before the Texas flood. It appeared March 28, 2025 in a similar montage posted to the @onelovenation76 TikTok account (archived here).
Clip 5, of a tanker truck washing down a street, was captured in Ruidoso, New Mexico, where the combination of rains and mud from a recent forest fire caused a flood on July 8, 2025. Lead Stories was able to geo-locate the clip using the truck and the motel sign in the background to match it to other footage of the same scene (archived here).
Clip 6, of a mudslide demolishing a hillside town, was taken in 2021 in Atami, a city west of Tokyo, Japan. The video matches July 4, 2021 coverage by news.com.au (archived here), a regional news site.
Lead Stories was unable to confirm the place or date shown in Clip 7, of a white car washing down a street, but the clearly visible license plate does not match standard U.S. proportions, which are 12" x 6", while the plate shown is more likely a 20.5" x 4.3" plate used in the EU or perhaps a slimline plate used in some Asian countries.
Clip 8, of grey floodwaters blasting from under a cement bridge, was part of the SPUTNIK coverage of June 30, 2025 flooding in and near Bardonecchia, Italy (archived here).
Clip 9, of a riverside wood-frame house collapsing off the left bank of a flooding river, was taken June 13, 2022 and posted by Parker Manning during flooding at Gardiner, Montana, along the Yellowstone River (archived here).
Clip 10, of a red-roofed house collapsing off the right bank of a flooding river, had already been online for two years when the TikTok video was posted. The clip appeared as part of Swarajyama Magazine's coverage of July, 9, 2023, flooding in Himachal Pradesh, one of the mountain states of India (archived here).
Clip 11, of flood waters wrapping the pilings of a brick-faced footbridge, includes background buildings that match those seen in flood video posted June 23, 2025 to the @ashis.chetri3 Instagram account (archived here). The location is not specified in the Instagram post, but other videos of the same scene include captions that mention Bangladesh.
Clip 12, of turbulent muddy water blasting from the floodgates of a concrete dam, was posted June 28, 2025, a week before the Texas floods, on the @amiramirtanoli YouTube channel (archived here).
Readers interested in other Lead Stories fact checks about the Independence Day Weekend 2025 floods in Texas will find them collected here.
