Does a real video show an officer helping to free a baby bear stuck in a concrete highway median when the mother bear failed? No, that's not true: The video is AI-generated. The OpenAI Verify tool found a SynthID watermark indicating that the video was made with OpenAI tools.
The video appeared in a post (archived here) by the @0ivankaTrump1 account on X on Sept. 30, 2026. It read:
A mother bear couldn't free her cub from the highway barrier... then this officer stepped in 🐻👮
This is what a screenshot of the video in the post looked like at the time of writing:
(Image source: post by @0ivankaTrump1 on X.)
Lead Stories uploaded a nine-second clip of the video to Hive Moderation (archived here). There, the AI-Generated Content Detection tool determined the video was 92.7% likely to be AI-generated (pictured below).
(Image source: Hive Moderation.)
Lead Stories uploaded a thumbnail image from the video to the OpenAI Verify tool (archived here). Verify detected a SynthID watermark, invisible to the human eye, that was embedded in the video when it was made with OpenAI tools (pictured below). SynthID is a watermarking tool from Google DeepMind (archived here).
If OpenAI tools were used to make the content, the SynthID digital watermark is detected with Verify. If Google's AI tools were used to make the content, a SynthID watermark can be detected with Gemini. An explainer (archived here) in the Google Help Center notes:
Important:
- While other companies have started to adopt SynthID watermarks, Gemini can currently only recognize content created by Google AI tools.
(Image source: OpenAI.)
