Did a woman jump from a helicopter to a trampoline by the Colosseum in Rome, and bounce back up to catch hold of the helicopter's tail? No, that's not true: the architecture of the Colosseum and surrounding city do not align with the real location and there are glitches with the shadows in the video. Additionally, one AI video detector tool analyzed the video and expressed high confidence that it was likely AI-generated.
The video appeared in a post (archived here) published by the @_afzaL_k account on X on Aug. 22, 2026. It was captioned:
The perfect jump in rome 😱
This is what the thumbnail image of the video looked like on X at the time of writing:
(Image source: post by @_afzaL_k on X.)
Aside from the improbability of the helicopter stunt, there are several visual flaws with the scene. Below is a screenshot from the last seconds of the video (left) and an image from the Britannica article on stadiums showing the Colosseum with the surrounding city and parks (right). The Colosseum has three tiers of arches topped by a fourth floor wall without arches which is partially in ruins. In the fake video, that fourth floor wall is standing on less than one quarter of the building, whereas in reality it wraps almost halfway around. The map of Rome (archived here) in Instantstreetview shows that the layout of streets and greenspaces do not match what is depicted in the fake video.
(Image sources: post by @_afzaL_k on X; Britannica.)
This GIF (below) shows the time between four and seven seconds in the video. It includes a zoomed-in detail of the type of glitch found in AI-generated videos. After the woman jumps from the helicopter she falls toward the center of the trampoline, and only in the moment before she hits does her shadow appear. The shadow and the woman meet as her feet touch down at the center point of the trampoline -- as would be expected -- and then part ways as she bounces back up. The shadow vanishes again instead of tracking a line directly to what should be the shadow of the helicopter. There does not appear to be a helicopter shadow at all.
(Image source: GIF detail from post by @_afzaL_k on X.)
Lead Stories uploaded the entire video, and separately the still thumbnail image, for analysis to the AI Video Detector at Fauxlens. It had a confidence score of 90% likely AI-generated for the analysis of the video, and a score of 91% for the image.
(Image source: Fauxlens.)
Lead Stories also uploaded a few seconds of the video clip to Hive Moderation, where the AI-generated content detection tool had an inconclusive reading of 50.1% likely to be AI-generated (archived here). The tool did point to one platform, Flux, above 101 others, as the likely source of the content, but the confidence score was only 0.1% (pictured below).
(Image source: Hive Moderation.)
When Lead Stories uploaded the still thumbnail image to the Hive tool (pictured below), it gave a lower overall reading of 31.4% likely to be AI-generated, but the confidence rating for a Flux origin was higher: 30.5% (archived here).
(Image source: Hive Moderation.)
