Nepal 'cloudburst' video is AI generated
"Live video footage of cloudburst in Nepal," reads the Hindi-language caption of a video posted on X on May 25, 2025.
It appears to show torrents of water emptying out of a cloud onto already flooded fields.
It was shared as monsoon rains in eastern Nepal caused at least one death, according to the Kathmandu Post, as well as widespread flooding and disruptions to transport (archived link).
Meteorologists in Nepal said the monsoon clouds had entered the country two weeks ahead of schedule, with the National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Authority predicting that around two million could be affected by monsoon-related disasters (archived link).
Image
Screenshot of the false X video, captured on June 6, 2025
The video was also shared among Hindi-speaking users on Facebook and Instagram.
"What a terrifying scene... it seems like water gushing out of a dam," reads a comment on one of the posts.
Another comment reads: "A very scary scene... May God protect everyone."
But Nepalese authorities told AFP that no such weather phenomena had occurred in the country.
"Monsoon (season) has begun in Nepal so many areas are receiving rain. But there has been no incident of any cloudburst recently," Dinkar Kayastha, an information officer with the Department of Hydrology and Meteorology, said on June 5.
A reverse image search on Google using keyframes from the falsely shared video led to the same footage posted in a YouTube short on May 19 (archived link).
The video's includes the hashtag "AI", and the user who posted the video also posted others with the same hashtag that appear to have been AI generated (archived link).
Image
Screenshot comparison of the falsely shared video (left) and YouTube short posted in May 2025 (right)
The director of Purdue University's Machine Learning and Media Forensics Lab, Shu Hu, also told AFP that there are visual inconsistencies in the video which confirm the clip was generated using AI ().
"The red roof was absent at the beginning of the video but appeared later," .
Image
Screenshots of the visual inconsistencies in the falsely shared video
AFP has debunked other false claims that utilised AI-generated footage here.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
France 24
2 hours ago
- France 24
Canada town near Vancouver ready to evacuate as fire nears
A state of emergency has been declared in Squamish, British Columbia, just 64 kilometres (40 miles) north of Vancouver, a city where the greater metropolitan area population exceeds three million. British Columbia's emergency management department warned late Tuesday that some residents of Squamish district "must be ready to leave on short notice." Max Whittenburg, a 19-year-old Squamish resident, told AFP he was "in shock" to see the fire encroach so close to the community. "I've never seen a fire in Squamish, at all, ever," the skateboard coach said. "We've already prepared most of the stuff in our house just in case we do have to evacuate," he added. "We'll be ready to go." Luke Procter, also 19, said he was staying up late and rising early to prepare, including by helping his father "hook up the trailer to our jeep just in case we need to go." Marc-Andre Parisien, a researcher at the Canadian Forest Service, said fires near the coast like the one threatening Squamish are particularly worrying because "these are areas that did not traditionally burn." They remain less intense than fires further inland, but "we have more and more of them," he told AFP. Two years after a historically devastating summer, Canada is once again facing a massive fire season, with burned areas already exceeding year-to-date averages from recent years. More than 220 active fires were burning across the country Tuesday, with half of them considered out of control. More than 3.3 million hectares (12,700 square miles) have already been consumed by flames -- an area equivalent to the country of Belgium. Smoke from Canadian fires has reached Europe after drifting across the Atlantic Ocean. Increased risk Two provinces in central Canada -- Saskatchewan and Manitoba -- had rough starts to fire season, and had to declare a state of emergency at the end of May. There was positive news in Saskatchewan on Wednesday after what provincial Premier Scott Moe called "a vicious couple of weeks" combatting wildfires "that in some cases have virtually been unstoppable." Moe said that while the province is still confronting fires in northern Saskatchewan, roughly half of those who had been forced to evacuate are "gearing up" to return home. Mega wildfires are still burning in western Alberta, British Columbia, and in northern Ontario, the country's most populous province. In recent years, Canada has experienced warming at least twice as fast as the rest of the globe. Linked to human-induced climate change, rising temperatures lead to reduced snow, shorter and milder winters, and earlier summer conditions that promote fires, experts say. Environment Canada forecast this week that much of of the country was likely to see higher than normal temperatures throughout the summer. That, combined with dry spring conditions in several areas, "could increase the risk of wildfires in the coming months," the weather and climate agency said.
France 24
7 hours ago
- France 24
Canada town near Vancouver ready to evacuate as fire approaches
A state of emergency has been declared in Squamish, British Columbia, just 64 kilometres (40 miles) north of Vancouver, a city where the greater metropolitan area population exceeds three million. British Columbia's emergency management department warned in a late Tuesday post on X that some residents of Squamish district "must be ready to leave on short notice." Max Whittenburg, a 19-year-old Squamish resident, told AFP he was "in shock" to see the fire encroach so close to the community. "I've never seen a fire in Squamish, at all, ever," the skateboard coach said. "We've already prepared most of the stuff in our house just in case we do have to evacuate," he added. "We'll be ready to go." Luke Procter, also 19, said he was staying up late and rising early to prepare, including by helping his father "hook up the trailer to our jeep just in case we need to go." Marc-Andre Parisien, a researcher at the Canadian Forest Service, said fires near the coast like the one threatening Squamish are particularly worrying because "these are areas that did not traditionally burn." They remain less intense than fires further inland, but "we have more and more of them," he told AFP. Two years after a historically devastating summer, Canada is once again facing a massive fire season, with burned areas already exceeding year-to-date averages from recent years. More than 220 active fires were burning across the country Tuesday, with half of them considered out of control. More than 3.3 million hectares (12,700 square miles) have already been consumed by flames -- an area equivalent to the country of Belgium. Smoke from Canadian fires has reached Europe after drifting across the Atlantic Ocean. Increased risk In recent years, Canada has experienced warming at least twice as fast as the rest of the globe. Linked to human-induced climate change, rising temperatures lead to reduced snow, shorter and milder winters, and earlier summer conditions that promote fires, experts say. Environment Canada forecast this week that much of Canada was likely to see higher than normal temperatures throughout the summer. That, combined with dry spring conditions in several areas, "could increase the risk of wildfires in the coming months," Environment Canada said. Two provinces in central Canada -- Saskatchewan and Manitoba -- were hard-hit with rough starts to fire season, and had to declare a state of emergency at the end of May. Mega wildfires are now burning in western Alberta and British Columbia, as well as in northern Ontario, the country's most populous province. Now, more than a dozen new fires are detected daily across Canada -- often started accidentally by humans, but sometimes ignited by lightning strikes.
France 24
7 hours ago
- France 24
New T-Rex ancestor discovered in drawers of Mongolian institute
This slender ancestor of the massive Tyrannosaurus Rex was around four metres (13 feet) long and weighed three quarters of a tonne, according to a new study in the journal Nature. "It would have been the size of a very large horse," study co-author Darla Zelenitsky of Canada's University of Calgary told AFP. The fossils were first dug up in southeastern Mongolia in the early 1970s but at the time were identified as belonging to a different tyrannosaur, Alectrosaurus. For half a century, the fossils sat in the drawers at the Institute of Paleontology of the Mongolian Academy of Sciences in the capital Ulaanbaatar. Then PhD student Jared Voris, who was on a trip to Mongolia, started looking through the drawers and noticed something was wrong, Zelenitsky said. It turned out the fossils were well-preserved, partial skeletons of two different individuals of a completely new species. "It is quite possible that discoveries like this are sitting in other museums that just have not been recognised," Zelenitsky added. 'Messy' family history They named the new species Khankhuuluu mongoliensis, which roughly means the dragon prince of Mongolia because it is smaller than the "king" T-Rex. Zelenitsky said the discovery "helped us clarify a lot about the family history of the tyrannosaur group because it was really messy previously". The T-Rex represented the end of the family line. It was the apex predator in North America until 66 million years ago, when an asteroid bigger than Mount Everest slammed into the Gulf of Mexico. Three quarters of life on Earth was wiped out, including all the dinosaurs that did not evolve into birds. Around 20 million years earlier, Khankhuuluu -- or another closely related family member -- is now believed to have migrated from Asia to North America using the land bridge that once connected Siberia and Alaska. This led to tyrannosaurs evolving across North America. Then one of these species is thought to have crossed back over to Asia, where two tyrannosaur subgroups emerged. One was much smaller, weighing under a tonne, and was nicknamed Pinocchio rex for its long snout. The other subgroup was huge and included behemoths like the Tarbosaurus, which was only a little smaller than the T-rex. One of the gigantic dinosaurs then left Asia again for North America, eventually giving rise to the T-Rex, which dominated for just two million years -- until the asteroid struck. © 2025 AFP
