Deluge of AI-generated and old content masks true impact of Hurricane Melissa
This storm was highly anticipated before it made landfall — leaving plenty of time for view-hungry content creators to make fakes
CLAIM: Circulating content purported to show the impact of Hurricane Melissa in Jamaica.
BACKGROUND: Hurricane Melissa slammed into Jamaica on October 28 as one of the Atlantic’s fiercest storms on record. The true scale of the damage was still unknown a day later.
METHOD: Reverse image searches, AI detectors and visual analysis revealed much of the content to be old, misrepresented or AI-generated. A common shark motif is also known to be a hoax during hurricanes.
RATING: Large volumes of content about Hurricane Melissa was false.
Sharks in the streets, cinematic storm clouds and close-up footage of terrified people being swept away in floods. The same types of fake content reappear time and again during natural disasters — just as viewers around the world are trying to find out the true impact of an incident.
It was no different this week when Hurricane Melissa, dubbed the ‘storm of a century’ and labelled a Category 5 as it barrelled through the Caribbean, slammed into Jamaica on Tuesday, October 28.
As it swirled off the Jamaican coast and triggered threat-to-life warnings in the island nation, forecasts showed Melissa was one of the strongest Atlantic hurricanes in history, with sustained wind speeds of 295 km/h.
This storm was highly anticipated and received widespread news coverage before it made landfall — leaving plenty of time for view-hungry content creators to collect old footage and create new material on generative AI platforms.
Some of the material that appeared online as the devastating storm twisted over Jamaica was real, but as some local people struggled to post amid power cuts, fake and misrepresented content filled the void on some platforms, particularly TikTok.
Old clips resurface in latest disaster compilations
For a time during the day Hurricane Melissa made landfall in Jamaica, the top result for the storm on TikTok was a video with more than 1.3 million views posted by an account called @police.swat28.
The account has a profile picture reading ‘Tornado News USA’ and posts exclusively disaster-related storm footage. It is a common account type on TikTok; disaster accounts emerge as top misinformation spreaders every time there is a storm or weather-related calamity, and Eurovision News Spotlight has analysed similar accounts in the past.
The viral video featured a dozen short clips stitched together as a compilation. Our analysis showed that most of these clips had previously been used to depict other storms — many of them on multiple occasions, as could be seen via a reverse image search on Google Lens.
There were other hints that these clips did not show Jamaica. There was an added audio that featured the sounds of thunderstorms, rain, and people screaming, that had no relation to the clips. The video was posted too early, before the full impact of the storm was felt in Jamaica, and featured both daytime and nighttime footage. In one of the clips, a U.S. flag can be seen struggling against the wind, as a tree is ripped from the ground.
Social media platforms like TikTok have long been accused of not doing enough to crack down on misinformation and misrepresented content. However, this video had been removed a day later. It was not clear whether the uploader deleted the video or whether the platform intervened.
Nevertheless, the same account later published another video featuring clips that frequent weather-watchers and social newsgathering journalists would recognise from past compilations about American storms.
One of the clips in that video also appeared in another TikTok that was later reshared to X (archived here), where it had been viewed over 370,000 times. It showed the roof being blown clean off a house. This footage has also been used in older compilations purporting to show prior storms.
This sea of old and misrepresented content was being posted just as the hurricane struck, capitalising on an eager audience searching for news on the scale of the devastation. While comments beneath these videos show the capacity for social media users to be tricked — at a time of huge variation in the general media literacy of the population — the content also poses risks to busy newsrooms eager for content out of a hard-to-reach area amid the 24-hour news cycle.
Sora videos appear in AI deluge
OpenAI’s text-to-video model Sora was recently updated with the release of Sora 2, which came along with a social media-style timeline so viewers could scroll an interface similar to TikTok but featuring exclusively AI-generated vertical entertainment content.
The new model caused a stir. Vox editor Bryan Walsh was scathing in his review — calling it ‘infinite servings of AI slop’ and an ‘unholy abomination’ — while tech correspondents more widely reported on the immediate copyright issues the new system presented.
At least on OpenAI’s own platform, it’s likely that users are aware they are looking at AI-generated content. Scanning the hurricane content on TikTok this week, however, revealed a lot of those videos are making their way onto more mainstream platforms.
One such clip showed a man struggling against rushing floodwaters while shouting in a recognisably Jamaican dialect before he is washed away. Despite a Sora logo and an ‘AI’ hashtag, many of those commenting still wondered whether anyone helped the man.
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Thankfully, much of the Sora content in this vertical format features a TikTok-style logo that bounces across the screen, making it harder to remove. As this technology becomes more prevalent, it is incumbent on journalists and tech companies alike to educate audiences about how to spot these videos.
Another tech brand involved in video generation, Google, has addressed the trust issue. Its DeepMind company released a detector called SynthID, can identify embedded watermarks in Google-made content, although the software is currently only available for early testers.
That’s how we were able to confirm the background of this video, which had almost half a million views and no AI label, and was also circulating amid Hurricane Melissa.
Many other brands of generated videos do not feature a watermark or have a logo that is easily cropped out, making it increasingly difficult to spot fakes as the quality of AI-generated material continues to improve.
The hurricane shark motif
One of the more bizarre phenomena that has re-emerged so often over the last decade that it’s become a meme: sharks where they shouldn’t be.
The same types of videos and images keep popping up during flooding, storms, and hurricanes. Sharks on the streets, sharks in swimming pools, sharks in people’s gardens.
This storm was no different. Dozens of AI-generated videos showed sharks (or similar but legged creatures) apparently on the loose after Hurricane Melissa. However, many of these videos were shared before or just as the hurricane was hitting Jamaica, long before the aftermath could be seen. Some of them, featuring heavy flooding, did not correspond with the situation being reported by news agencies on the ground at the time of their posting.
The use of sharks swimming onshore in fake content has been around since before the explosion of generative AI footage.
The original shark fake — an image of a shark on a motorway — has been in use for at least 14 years. The shark itself was cut from a real image captured in the early 2000s, as reported by National Geographic, and it was later photoshopped into a street scene and spread around during storms. During Hurricane Irene, which battered the Caribbean and U.S. East Coast in 2011, several media outlets fell for the hoax image.
Anyone can fall for fakes like these, even when they’re old but re-emerge ostensibly as part of a new crisis story, as Eva Wackenreuther pointed out in 2023 when it was once again circulating, and grabbed the attention of Ted Cruz.
Sharks will probably keep coming back as a motif every time there’s a major storm. One day, maybe sharks will swim ashore and give storm-watchers a ‘boy who cried wolf’ moment. Until then, given their meme status, it pays to be extra suspicious whenever they do pop up — no matter how plausible their appearance might seem.
This analysis was carried out in collaboration with members of Eurovision News Spotlight: Eva Wackenreuther (ORF), Thomas Sparrow (Deutsche Welle), Thomas Pontillon (franceinfo), Carlos Baraibar (3Cat), Jari Valtee (YLE), and Natalie Miller (EBU).
SOURCES
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