Does a real video show a crowd who just crossed the English Channel and a man who thinks he's entitled to money and a free house from the "England Government"? No, that's not true: This video is AI-generated. The image-to-video scene was made using a real newspaper photo as a source frame. The photo originally appeared in a 2015 New York Times article about the perils Arab and African migrants faced once they reached Libya.
The eight-second AI-generated video appeared in a post (archived here) on X by @HJB_News__ on May 31, 2026. It was captioned:
Nearly 900 cross in the last 7 days, with 223 crossing the Channel yesterday. 'I want my money and free house'.
This is a screenshot from the start of the video:
(Image source: post by @HJB_News__ on X.com.)
A reverse image search with Google Lens (archived here) returns an April 27, 2015, New York Times article titled, "Before Dangers at Sea, African Migrants Face Perils of a Lawless Libya" (pictured below).
(Image source: google.com.)
The photo appears as the eighth slide of 11 in the New York Times article (pictured below). The caption under the photo describes the situation in Libya without specific mention of the individuals pictured. The caption reads:
The migrants are ostensibly awaiting repatriation to their home countries, and the International Organization for Migration recently helped Senegal bring back about 400. But detention officials said Senegal was an exception. Many African countries have shut down their embassies in Libya or simply neglect their migrants. Eritrea considers them defectors and thus criminals. Tyler Hicks/The New York Times
(Image source: nytimes.com.)
The archived copy of the article shows only the first image in a slideshow. A high-resolution copy of the image in question was archived (here) on May 7, 2015. The date the photo was taken is not noted in the article, but it would have been on or before the April 27, 2015, date of publication. Neither the original newspaper photo nor the fake AI-generated video clip derived from it shows a scene that happened in England in 2026.
