Does a viral video of a protester chanting "No queso! No cheese!" before being sprayed with orange-colored gas by law enforcement show a real-life scene? No, that's not true: A prominent watermark identified the video as having been generated by a specific AI tool. Visual artifacts indicate it was AI-generated, including faceless people in military fatigues and several examples of gibberish writing in a non-existent language.
The claim appeared in a post (archived here) published on X on October 7, 2025. It opened: "The police are spraying tear gas directly into the faces of people who are just chanting slogans..."
In the video shared in the post, an adolescent with a ponytail was seen chanting at the face of a man in military fatigues moments before being pepper-sprayed by him:
No queso! No cheese!
This is what the clip looked like on X at the time of writing:
(Image source: Lead Stories screenshot of post at x.com/ultras_antifaa)
A few seconds in, however, a Sora watermark (archived here) appeared on the screen: That was the name of an OpenAI app capable of generating realistic-looking videos from textual prompts:
(Image source: Lead Stories screenshot of post at x.com/ultras_antifaa)
That was not the only sign that the video did not authentically document any protests.
A closer look at the line of people in uniforms shows that some of them did not have faces at all:
(Image source: Lead Stories screenshot of post at x.com/ultras_antifaa)
A green street sign was written, as is common in generative-ai-produced images, in gibberish:
(Image source: Lead Stories screenshot of post at x.com/ultras_antifaa)
The poster carried by the protester, too, displayed illegible symbols on both sides:
(Image source: Lead Stories screenshot of post at x.com/ultras_antifaa)
(Image source: Lead Stories screenshot of post at x.com/ultras_antifaa, rotated 90 degrees by Lead Stories to present the writing as it would appear when the sign was held straight up.)
Another variation of the claim (archived here) showed a young man chanting "No queso! No cheese!" in front of law enforcement. In that case, a hand that appeared in the clip showed one of the classic signs pointing to AI: an anatomically incorrect hand:
(Image source: Lead Stories screenshot of post facebook.com/dgikaos)
Previously, Lead Stories reported on another viral video in which one more chanting protester was sprayed with the same orange-colored gas -- that was an AI generated clip as well.
