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).
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 Thai-language caption 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).
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 (archived link).
"The red roof was absent at the beginning of the video but appeared later," he said on June 3.
AFP has debunked other false claims that utilised AI-generated footage here.
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