Does a viral clip really show an oxygen tank and a patient on a gurney being sucked from a hallway straight into the bore of an MRI machine? No, that's not true: It's clearly labelled as having been created by Sora, the OpenAI-owned text-to-video tool. The video includes multiple glaring departures from reality: A marked exit door would not lead immediately into the danger zone at the mouth of an MRI, let alone leading into an MRI suite. These powerful magnetic machines are installed in a room much larger than the machine itself, with empty space around them and four safety zones through which patients pass before being placed on the machine's sliding platform. That patient platform is missing in the video clip, which only shows a gaping maw.
The video is one of dozens of social media AI MRI disaster clips this one appearing in a Nov. 7, 2025 TikTok post (archived here) on the lifeline53270 account under the title "MRI Magnet Disaster". The description text with the post continued:
| Oxygen Tank Pulled Inside | Real Hospital CCTV?"#HospitalCCTV
#MRIMachineAccident
#CaughtOnCamera
#RealisticAIVideo
#soraai
This is what the post looked like on TikTok at the time of writing:
(Image source: Lead Stories screenshot of video posted by lifeline53270.)
Using TikTok's search function, Lead Stories found dozens of "MRI Disaster" clips (search archived here), most of them obviously fake, examples of which are seen below, showing folded up humans, obese humans jammed in, and hardware flying from the hands of staff:
(Image source: Lead Stories screenshot of a fraction of "MRI Disaster" search results on TikTok.com.)
There are legitimate safety concerns around MRI machines, which contain dangerously powerful magnets that can make ferromagnetic objects into flying projectiles, according to the University of San Francisco Department of Radiology warning page:
Small objects such as paper clips and hairpins have a terminal velocity of 40mph when pulled into a 1.5 T magnet and therefore pose a serious risk to the patient and anyone else in the scan room.
But the lifeline53270 TikTok video is implausible for the following reasons:
- No MRI would be directly inside the kind of public "EXIT" door shown in the video, under safety standards published by the American College of Radiology to isolate MRI magnetic fields;
- The MRI in the video smoothly pivots 90 degrees, though such a device typically weighs from 7 to 10 tons and would not easily slide around;
- Radiology staff know to use non-ferromagnetic oxygen tanks in the MRI suite, so that patients and operators will not be injured by flying cylinders like the one shown in the lifeline53270 video.
