Overview
- The widely shared clip claimed a man identified as Raju Patel petted a tiger in Madhya Pradesh’s Pench and offered it liquor.
- Fact-checkers at The Quint’s WebQoof used DeepFake-O-Meter and found conclusive signals that the visuals were AI-generated.
- The Trusted Information Alliance’s Deepfakes Analysis Unit reported similar results using Is It AI? and WasItAI on the video and its keyframes.
- Pench Tiger Reserve deputy director Rajneesh Singh dismissed the footage as fake and said it did not depict a road inside the reserve.
- No credible local reporting corroborated the alleged incident, while some outlets relayed the narrative without verification as experts urged caution about increasingly realistic wildlife deepfakes.