Artificial intelligence

Posts falsely claim AI video shows moment Indonesian school collapsed

  • Published on October 9, 2025 at 05:41
  • 2 min read
  • By AFP Indonesia

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After part of a multi-storey Islamic boarding school in Indonesia collapsed while students gathered for afternoon prayers, an AI-generated video was shared in social media posts falsely claiming it showed the cave-in. The circulating clip was cropped to remove the watermark of the AI platform used to create it and differs from photos showing the aftermath of the deadly disaster.

The video, depicting a building collapsing over another structure, has been viewed more than 740,000 times since it was posted on TikTok on September 30, 2025.

Indonesian-language text on the video reads: "The moment a four-storey building at Al-Khoziny Islamic Boarding School in Sidoarjo collapses while students were performing the Asr prayer in congregation."

It circulated a day after the school on Indonesia's Java island partially collapsed as more than 170 students gathered for prayers (archived link).

Authorities said 67 people were killed in the disaster, the country's deadliest of the year. The cause of the cave-in is still under investigation, but experts believe substandard construction may have contributed.

Screenshot of the false TikTok post captured on October 8, 2025, with a red X added by AFP

The same video was also shared elsewhere in similar TikTok and Facebook posts but it is in fact AI-generated.

A reverse image search on Google using keyframes from the falsely shared clip led to similar footage posted on TikTok on the day of the collapse, where it was presented as if it were part of a genuine news report by Liputan6 (archived link). 

"The Moment of the Al Khoziny Boarding School's prayer room collapse," reads the purported news report's headline.

The caption, however, includes the hashtags "AI" and "Illustration". A faint watermark for PixVerse.ai, an AI video generation platform, is visible in the upper right corner but was cropped out in the circulating version (archived link).

Screenshot comparison of the falsely shared video (left) and the similar TikTok clip (right), with the AI watermark highlighted by AFP

A keyword search of the headline of the purported Liputan6 news report found the genuine article included a different embedded image (archived link).

Moreover,  AFP photos show structures depicted as collapsing in the AI-generated video were in fact still standing.

An aerial view shows rescuers searching for victims at the Al Khoziny Islamic boarding school in Sidoarjo, East Java, on October 5, 2025. (AFP / Dicky Bisinglasi)

AFP has previously debunked other false claims relying on AI-generated images.

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