On December 4, social media users around the world started circulating photos of an uncanny story: a raccoon who broke into a liquor store in Ashland, Virginia, in the eastern United States. After breaking a number of bottles and consuming his fill, the raccoon was discovered passed out in the store’s restroom.
Soon after these photos were posted, a video said to show surveillance footage from the liquor store also appeared online. The footage shows the raccoon breaking a bottle and then slurping up the puddle. After ravaging an entire store aisle, the animal wobbles into the bathroom, where he passes out.
The video has garnered more than 800,000 views since it was posted on X on December 6. The profiles that originally shared the video may look like news accounts, but if you take a look at their history, they only seem to share viral videos.
While the story and the photos that circulated online are real, this video is fake.
An AI-generated video
This fake surveillance camera video was actually generated by artificial intelligence.
While the video does at first glance seem realistic, if you look a little closer, you’ll see that the wine labels and the prices are all written in gibberish. This is a dead giveaway that artificial intelligence has been used to create the video, as AI still struggles to correctly generate text.
Another clue that the video isn’t authentic is that the aisle shown in the video is different from the aisle that appears in the authentic photos of the ransacked liquor store posted on Facebook by the Hanover County animal rescue service, which picked up the drunk raccoon. In the real store, there are quite a few cardboard boxes amongst the bottles. However, they are nowhere to be seen in the AI-generated video.
There is actually real footage from the store’s surveillance cameras. However, the images are a lot less clean than the fake video – the store room and aisles are messy. Moreover, part of the real surveillance footage was filmed in black and white, while the AI-generated film is in colour.
The Hanover County Animal Protection and Shelter took to Facebook to provide an update on the bandit raccoon.
“After a few hours of sleep and zero signs of injury (other than maybe a hangover and poor life choices), he was safely released back to the wild, hopefully having learned that breaking and entering is not the answer.”
This article has been translated from the original in French by Brenna Daldorph.