30-03-2025
Fact Check: Video showing hundreds of people trapped on sinking ship cropped to remove 'AI' label
Claim:
A six-second video authentically shows hundreds of people clinging to life aboard a sinking ship.
Rating:
A rumor that users circulated online in March 2025 claimed a six-second video authentically showed hundreds of people clinging to life aboard a sinking ship.
For example, on March 21, a Facebook user named Pcgs Agila Dabon shared the video (archived) with a caption reading "ship going to sink down." Within six days, the clip had received over 11 million views. Users also shared posts featuring the same video on Facebook, TikTok and YouTube.
However, the truth was that those users shared a cropped version of a video that earlier featured an "AI" label. In other words, a person we have yet to identify originally created the clip with a generative artificial-intelligence (AI) tool. The aforementioned Facebook user did not yet respond to a request for comment regarding where the clip originated.
A reverse-image search located several posts displaying the full-size video with its AI label. For example, users on Instagram (archived) and Threads (archived) shared the clip with people reacting to the fake scene of the sinking ship. Both videos displayed the word "Daryka," potentially as a watermark for a Facebook user posting videos and other AI-generated clips with similar watermarks. That user did not yet respond to an email asking about the video's creation, and the clip did not appear on the account's profile feed.
One Facebook user's upload of the video featured a clean thumbnail image without a person's reaction superimposed on top of the clip. (Readers can download the thumbnail image for themselves by inserting the clip's link into a third party video-downloading website such as
The fake scene of people clinging to life aboard a sinking ship resembled genuine tragic incidents involving boats carrying migrants. For example, in June 2023, a commercial fishing vessel packed with as many as 750 men, women and children from Egypt, Pakistan, Palestine and Syria sank off the coast of Greece. Reuters reported the final figures of passengers as 104 survivors, 82 located corpses and hundreds missing, all believed dead.
For further reading, previous fact checks examined other instances of AI-generated content, including a photo purportedly showing a demon posing with a family, as well as a picture of a flight attendant handing out cigarettes to to passengers on an airplane.
Brito, Renata. "Diverging Narratives Emerge after Trawler with Hundreds of Migrants Sinks in the Mediterranean." The Independent, 17 June 2023,
"Facebook Video Downloader - Free Online Tools." Toolzin,
"Google Lens - Search What You See." Google Lens,
Tagaris, Karolina, et al. "A Year after Greece Migrant Boat Tragedy, Answers and Justice Still out of Reach." Reuters, 7 June 2024,
