Video purportedly showing dog saving baby from Los Angeles fires is artificially generated
- Published on January 22, 2025 at 14:16
- Updated on January 22, 2025 at 14:26
- 3 min read
- By Tolera FIKRU GEMTA, AFP Ethiopia
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“A dog saved a baby's life during a wildfire in America. Please watch this miracle,” reads a Facebook post published in Amharic on January 14, 2025.
Shared more than 600 times, it contains a 17-second TikTok video showing a dog standing on its hind legs and pushing a sleeping baby out of a burning house.
Several commenters appeared to believe the footage was real.
“Thanks to lord Jesus Christ for saving a kid,” one user commented.
“I was about to faint at first. Thanks to God,” wrote another.
The clip also featured the TikTok handle @fairytalesmaster in the right-hand corner. AFP Fact Check found that the account published the video on January 12, 2025, with users resharing it more than 8,000 times.
“Dog Saves Baby from House Fire! #losangeles #losangelesfire #baby #dog,” reads the caption.
Several comments below the video were posted in Amharic, suggesting the clip was also widely shared on TikTok in Ethiopia.
LA wildfires
Los Angeles, the second most populous city in the US, has been ravaged by two major wildfires for more than a week, claiming at least 27 lives and burning 40,000 acres of land (archived here).
Tens of thousands of people fled their homes as the fires tore through the city of Altadena and the upscale neighbourhood of Pacific Palisades.
A large-scale federal investigation into the causes of the deadly blazes is underway (archived here).
However, video footage purporting to show a dog saving a baby from a burning house is not authentic.
Synthetic video
AFP Fact Check used an AI content detector called Hive Moderation to establish if the video was genuine (archived here). According to the results, there was a 98-percent likelihood of it being artificially generated.
AFP Fact Check also used the video verification tool InVID-WeVerify to conduct reverse image searches on keyframes from the video.
The search results included a video published on a YouTube channel called “BraveFur” on January 1, 2025 – a week before the outbreak of the Los Angeles wildfires (archived here)
YouTube’s warning notice describes the footage as “synthetic content” created by users using artificial content creation tools.
A review of the YouTube channel reveals similar artificially generated content focused on animals.
These include short videos of a dog blocking traffic to save its injured owner on the road and a gorilla shielding a child who fell into its enclosure.
An Amharic song was added to the footage published on Facebook to draw the attention of local social media users.
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