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The crash of a Delta airliner at Toronto Pearson airport on Monday injured 21 people with no fatalities. Videos of the incident show how remarkable this outcome is, with the plane sliding along the ground as a wing is torn off, ending upside down on the tarmac.
Videos posted on social media show passengers evacuating the Delta plane that crashed and flipped at Toronto's Pearson airport.
The Canadian Press
Artificial-intelligence-generated visuals of the crash have been circulating on social media. We’ll examine some prominent ones.
Image of a pilot is AI-generated
An image of a male pilot shared on X Feb. 17 and seen over 600,000 times is AI-generated. Showing a man in a shirt with the markings of an airline pilot, the image has the watermark in the lower right corner for Grok, an AI chatbot and image generator developed by Elon Musk’s xAI company.
The logo on the shirt of the man in the image doesn’t match Delta’s branding or what the airline’s pilots wear. An AI image detector determined the image was fake with greater than 99 per cent confidence. The same image was also posted to Threads.
Screenshot of an AI-generated image posted to X falsely claiming to be the pilot of the Delta aircraft that crashed in Toronto.X
Faked plane videos on TikTok
A video posted to TikTok on Feb. 17 appears to be made with AI. The plane shown in the video bounces in an unrealistic way and the number and position of landing gear changes as the video continues. The video’s caption said it was an “AI Simulation” but it didn’t carry TikTok’s AI-generated label.
Screenshots of an AI-generated video posted to TikTok falsely showing how the Delta airliner crashed in Toronto on Feb. 17.TikTok
A different TikTok account posted a video on Feb. 17 and another on Feb. 18 supposedly on the crash. Both were labelled as AI-generated on TikTok.
The videos show the airliner right-side up and include other inconsistencies such as jet engines in the wrong place and two flight crew facing each other while grasping each other’s arms. The account that posted both videos describes itself as “The future of news: realism and precision with AI!”
Screenshots of an AI-generated video posted to TikTok falsely showing the aftermath of the Delta crash and pilots grasping each other's arms.TikTok