Is a video real that shows a squirrel spinning on top of a Waymo car? No, that's not true: The clip is a digital creation, not authentic footage. It includes a faint AI watermark in the upper-left corner and visual glitches in the background, both of which are common indicators of synthetic media. Also, an AI detection tool stated that "the video is likely to be AI-generated" after assessing the content.
The claim appeared in a post and video (archived here) by the @evanrosenman account on Instagram on April 23, 2026. It said:
Squirrel VS Waymo 🤣🐿️
This is what a screenshot of the video in the post looked like on Instagram at the time of writing:
(Image source: post by @evanrosenman on Instagram.)
The video can be viewed in this embed of the post:
AI detection
The Hive Moderation AI-Generated Content Detection tool concluded that the video overall was 100 percent "likely to be AI-generated":
(Image source: Hive Moderation.)
Additional AI indicators
The fake clip has two other indicators of AI generation. In the upper-left corner, circled in yellow, is a very faint AI watermark, which is difficult to see unless there is a dark background to highlight it. Also, two street signs in the video, one above the other, circled in red, are an AI "hallucination" -- they are written in gibberish, not spelling out anything like a street name or "one way."
Both examples appear below:
(Image source: post by @evanrosenman on Instagram.)
