Fake Hurricane Melissa videos are flooding the internet, prompting fears that misinformation could endanger people in the storm’s path.
Most of these are AI generated, with many bearing the watermark of Sora, Open AI’s recently-released text-to-video generator tool.
“The use of this AI system to generate fake videos that misinform the public during a dangerous hurricane constitutes indirect harm to communities by undermining the dissemination of accurate safety information,” warned the OECD Public Policy Observatory.
“This misinformation can lead to people underestimating the storm’s severity, which is a clear harm to communities and public safety.”
Similarly, widely-shared footage of a group of men running to escape from a huge wave shows a watermark from VEO, Google’s text-to-video generator.
Other videos that are circulating widely recycle footage of other storm events, meanwhile, with one clip apparently showing the eye of the storm filmed from a passenger plane flying nearby. “That moment when you realise the swirling clouds below aren’t just clouds… they’re a hurricane,” the caption reads.
But, said BBC fact-checkers, the footage isn’t real, and was posted by a user who has a history of sharing fake videos of natural disasters. “The clip appears similar to real footage filmed by a US Air Force Reserve crew known as the ‘Hurricane Hunters’ on Monday,” they said.
And meanwhile, pointed out fact-checker Snopes, while the clouds of a hurricane can be anywhere from about 30,000 feet high to 50,000 feet high, commercial passenger aircraft typically fly at between 30,000 and 42,000 feet.
“Even if such an aircraft was flying at the highest end of that range and the clouds of Hurricane Melissa were at the lowest end of its range, a passenger plane would still avoid the hurricane entirely,” Snopes said.
Other images and videos, either AI-generated or otherwise faked, purport to show sharks swimming the streets. However, the most widely shared of these, which has received millions of views, comes from an account that openly admits to the use of AI.
Some videos appear to show people in Jamaica partying, boating or swimming, minimizing the threat of the hurricane. This has prompted Jamaica’s information minister, Senator Dana Morris Dixon, to urge people to listen only to official channels of information.
“You have to be very discerning. You have to know what is good information from bad information. If you want to know where the storm is going, if you want to know what to do, you need to look for official sources,” she said.
“You need to be looking at JIS (Jamaica Information Service), ODPEM’s (Office of Disaster Preparedness and Emergency Management’s) information sites and the Office of the Prime Minister page. Those are legitimate places.”
This time last year, Hurricane Helene prompted a similar rash of fake videos and misinformation across social media platforms, many of an antisemitic nature.
Researchers at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue said they’d found 33 posts on X containing claims debunked by FEMA, the White House and the U.S. government that together gathered more than 160 million views.
