Is that viral video of an adult gorilla beating up a crocodile authentic footage of the adult protecting a juvenile gorilla? No, that's not true: Sseveral visual artifacts that are evidence of common shortcomings of video concocted by generative AI. Among them, a white halo around the gorilla's outline, unnatural stiffness of the crocodile, and a fight in mud that never sticks to either combatant.
The video appeared in an August 11, 2025 post on X.com (archived here) by the RodneyMKirabo account under the title:
The gorilla protecting his child does whatever he wants 🐊🦍
Here's what the post looked like on X at the time this fact check was written:
(Image source: Screenshot by Lead Stories of post at x.com/RodneyMKirabo.)
Visual Artifacts of Generative AI:
1. Despite being bitten on the soft tissue of the mouth and chin, the juvenile gorilla does not bleed, a likely flaw in the prompt the AI operator used to order up the video.
2. When the gorilla swings the crocodile in the air, the writhing creature of earlier and later moments is stiff as a plank.
3. The forms of both the adult and juvenile gorillas are outlined in a wide band of fuzzy grey that contrasts with their fur and their surroundings, likely showing how the gorilla images were dropped into the waterhole scene:
(Image source: Screenshot by Lead Stories of post at x.com/RodneyMKirabo.)
4. Despite the fact that the battle takes place in the mud at the edge of a water hole or river, four seconds after a giant mud slam, the bright white belly of the crocodile stays mud-free, as does the slick chest of the adult gorilla:
(Image source: Comparison graph comprised of timecode-annotated screenshots by Lead Stories of post at x.com/RodneyMKirabo.)
While no one of those elements might be sufficient to declare the video fake, the combination of all four identifies the clip as the sort of low-quality video produced to generate traffic to social media users' pages and accounts.
In addition to the evidence of AI generation of the video, the post on X provides no information about the source of the video to confirm its authenticity.
