Fact Check: Explosions near Dubai’s Burj Khalifa? No, video is made using AI

Hyderabad: On February 28, Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was reportedly killed in joint US-Israel airstrikes on the country. Tehran called the attacks unprovoked and illegal, and responded by launching missiles at Israel and several Gulf countries, including the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

Amid these military escalations, a video has gone viral showing two jets flying by the Burj Khalifa tower in Dubai, UAE. Blasts can be heard in the distance as fire erupts and smoke billows at the location of impact.

Sharing the video on X (now deleted), a user wrote, “Chaos of Iranian Missiles in Dubai… Panic Everywhere… People are running helter-skelter to save their lives”. (Archive)

Fact Check

NewsMeter found that the viral claim is false. The video is AI-generated.

Did the news report about an attack at Burj Khalifa?

We did not find any news reports using the viral visuals while reporting about blasts near Dubai’s Burj Khalifa tower.

Upon analysing the viral video further, we found that the cameraperson’s hands seem to be distorted. This is a usual visual discrepancy that occurs in videos generated using Artificial Intelligence (AI)-

To check whether the video has been made using AI, we used an AI detection tool, Hive Moderation. The tool determined that the video is 99.7 per cent likely to have been AI-generated or a deepfake.

Another AI detection tool, Sight Engine, also determined that the video is 99 per cent likely to have been generated using AI.

Therefore, NewsMeter concludes that the viral video is AI-generated.