Is a video showing a prisoner grabbing a female prison guard who is putting a dinner tray in their cell real? No, that's not true: The video shows clear signs of being AI-generated, and a detection tool confirmed this with 99.9% certainty. While the earliest versions of the video found online provided no sources or specific details about the alleged incident, the post itself was labeled "Made with AI" on X.
The claim appeared in a post made on X by the @elenacute01 account on May 7, 2026 (archived here). The post included a video of what looked like a prisoner busting through a door to grab a law enforcement officer as she tried to deliver food to the prisoner. The video was captioned:
Nah, the way it grabbed her is pure nightmare fuel. I would have quit my job on the spot.
This is what the video in the post looked like on X:
(Image source: Post by @elenacute01 on X.)
While the video was marked as "Made with AI" on this post, searches on Google Images (archived here) and Yandex Images (archived here) found several other postings of the video online without that disclaimer. The earliest appearance of the video found by Lead Stories on social media was a post made on Instagram on March 12, 2026 (archived here). Also on March 12, the Russian version of the website Haberler (archived here) and the website SonDakika.com (archived here), both based in Turkey, posted similarly written articles about the video with nonspecific details about the supposed incident. For example, they both claimed the alleged situation happened in the United States without making the exact prison clear. No sources were cited.
There are visual clues that the video was AI-generated. The clarity of the door number is unusual considering all other identifying details are out of focus. The blurry details include the guard's and prisoner's faces and the text and symbols on the guard's and prisoner's uniforms. The symbols also look alike, almost as if the prisoner is wearing a law enforcement T-shirt (red circles).
(Image source: post by @elenacute01 on X. Red circles added by Lead Stories.)
The door, which looks like it is made of a heavy material like steel, is busted through by the prisoner as if it is made of drywall (orange circle).
(Image source: post by @elenacute01 on X. Orange circle added by Lead Stories.)
After the prisoner grabs the tray from the guard, some equipment hanging from the guard's belt gets inexplicably stuck to the tray (yellow circles).
(Image source: post by @elenacute01 on X. Yellow circles added by Lead Stories.)
Additionally, what looks like a date in the top right corner of the video changes frequently, going backward and forward in the calendar year several times. Examples of some of the changes, shown with the timestamps of the video, are included below (pink arrows):
(Image source: post by @elenacute01 on X. Pink arrows added by Lead Stories.)
There are also strange audio occurrences in the video. There are two voices: one of the guard, and one of unidentified female who sounds like another law enforcement officer but is nowhere in sight. It is almost as if the other officer is watching the footage and commenting as it happens, but she gives a delayed scream when the guard is pulled in by the prisoner. The prisoner does not seem to make any noise. Also, most of what the guard says is gibberish.
On May 8, 2026, Lead Stories used the Hive Moderation AI-Generated Content Detection tool and it concluded the video was 99.9% "likely to be AI-generated."
(Image source: Hive Moderation.)
