Fact check: Viral video of woman shooting harasser on motorcycle is AI-generated

Multiple users on several social media platforms were sharing a video since Sunday showing a woman opening fire after a man on a motorcycle allegedly tries to approach her. However, the video is AI-generated. How it started On Sunday, a social media user shared a video on X showing a man on a motorcycle approaching a woman walking on the street. He closes in with a 180-degree drift, after which the woman, clad in a burka, pulls out a gun and fires in the man’s direction, prompting him to flee from the scene. The post attracted 333,000 views. An Indian account shared the same video on Instagram in a similar context. The post garnered about 171,000 likes. Another Instagram user shared the same video in a similar context, gaining 34,300 likes. Another Indian user shared the viral clip with the caption: “When a Karan Johar’s movie hero meets Anurag Kashyap’s movie heroine”. The post gained 170,000 views on X. Similarly, the video was shared by several other users on social media platforms Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, and X, as can be seen here, here, here, here, here and here; collectively gaining 10,000 views. Methodology A fact-check was initiated to determine the veracity of the claim due to its high virality and keen public interest in the video. Analysing the video frame by frame to identify visual discrepancies showed that the man appears to stop the motorcycle in a stunt-like 180-degree drift that is unusually smooth, while no skid marks were seen on the road. Secondly, at the 1-second mark, the gun suddenly appears in the woman’s hand, as if it morphs into the video. At the 4-second mark, the dust cloud produced after the woman fires at the road appears unusually large and thick, despite the road being made of asphalt. An asphalt road would not normally produce such heavy dust from a simple gunshot. Similarly, when the man flees on the motorcycle, the rear wheel appears to produce a similarly large amount of dust on an otherwise clean asphalt road. The video was further analysed using AI-detection tools with Hive Moderation labelling the video as 94.2 per cent AI-generated, while Deepfake Detection labelled it 97pc AI-generated. X too marked the video as AI-generated content on one post that had shared the clip. Furthermore, a reverse image search revealed that the same video was originally posted by an Instagram account which repeatedly shares similar AI-generated videos, as seen from its past posts. The video was shared on June 27, 2026, and it was the oldest found on the internet.         View this post on Instagram                       Fact-check status: false The claim that a viral video shows a woman shooting a harasser on a motorcycle is false. The video is AI-generated. This fact check was originally published by iVerify Pakistan — a project of CEJ-IBA and UNDP.

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