Did a news helicopter capture live footage showing a crew of paramedics chasing a runaway gurney as it careened down a grassy slope? No, that's not true: The scene featuring a fake "Chopper 5 - Breaking News" chyron is AI-generated. There are several clues that the video is not real. Three blurred areas in the video frame indicate the positions where AI watermarks were removed. Over the course of a few seconds the hillside morphs from rough grass and scrub into a playing field painted with a stripe and a precise grid of dark dots. Additional versions of this scene, likely generated with variations of the same AI prompt, have been published on social media.
The AI-generated video appears in a post (archived here) published by the X account @dutchessprim on March 16, 2026. It is captioned:
Live look at the plan for Iran
This is a screenshot from the video:
(Image source: post by @dutchessprim on X.com.)
The video on X was a repost of a video (archived here) posted by @Lea on Jan. 11, 2026.
The Lead Stories composite image (below) shows three screenshots from the beginning, middle and end of the video. From left to right, the panels show how the AI rendering of the scrubby field morphs over a few seconds and begins to take on the look of a playing field. A painted white stripe appears along with a perfect grid of dark dots. In the center panel Lead Stories has indicated with yellow boxes where the AI-generated video has blurred areas; in the upper and lower right corners, and along the center left side. These blurs are artifacts of a watermark removal tool. In this instance, the blur removed the watermarks and also removed the heads of the paramedics when they overlap with that zone of the frame.
(Image source: post by @dutchessprim on X.com.)
Lead Stories identified additional videos on Instagram and TikTok that appear to have been generated from the same prompt, or are copycats of the same theme (pictured below). These show not only the runaway gurney, but the fake chyron of a "Live" news helicopter broadcast. Two videos were posted on Instagram by the account @aironic.nl; one on Jan. 14, 2026, and another on Jan. 17, 2026 (archived here and here). Two similar videos were published on TikTok; one on Jan. 11, 2026, by @lipsforjits1, and another on Jan. 23, 2026, by @viralvortexlab (archived here and here).
(Image source: Lead Stories montage of screenshots from Instagram and TikTok.)
