Phony AI-generated videos of Hurricane Melissa flood social media sites

One viral video shows what appears to be four sharks swimming in a Jamaican hotel's pool as floodwaters allegedly brought on by Hurricane Melissa swamp the area. Another purportedly depicts Jamaica's Kingston airport completely ravaged by the storm. But neither of these events happened; they’re just AI-generated misinformation circulating on social media as the storm churned across the Caribbean several weeks ago. These videos and others have racked up millions of views on social media platforms, including X, TikTok, and Instagram. Some of the clips appear to be spliced together or based on footage of old disasters. Others appear to be created entirely by AI video generators. "I am in so many WhatsApp groups, and I see all of these videos coming. Many of them are fake," said Jamaica's Education Minister Dana Morris Dixon. "And so we urge you to please listen to the official channels." Although it's common for hoax photos, videos, and misinformation to surface during natural disasters, they're usually debunked quickly. But videos generated by new artificial intelligence tools have taken the problem to a new level by making it easy to create and spread realistic clips. In this case, the content has been showing up in social media feeds alongside genuine footage shot by local residents and news organizations, sowing confusion among social media users. Experts noted that Hurricane Melissa is the first big natural disaster since OpenAI launched the latest version of its video generation tool Sora last September. "Now, with the rise of easily accessible and powerful tools like Sora, it has become even easier for bad actors to create and distribute highly convincing synthetic videos," said Sofia Rubinson, a senior editor at NewsGuard, which analyzes online misinformation. AI expert Henry Ajder said most of the hurricane deepfakes he's seen aren't inherently political. He suspects it's "much closer to more traditional kind of click-based content, which is to try and get engagement, to try and get clicks." This article was provided by The Associated Press.