Palm Beach crash video is real

TLDR

• PolitiFact found no evidence that the Palm Beach Learjet crash dashcam video is AI-generated, and major outlets carried it.¹³
• The "100% AI" claims rested on Hive Moderation screenshots; PolitiFact's own run on the original clip did not flag it.¹
• Lead Stories says Google's SynthID found a watermark showing a separate sharp "photo" was made or edited with OpenAI tools.²

Dashcam footage of a Learjet 60 diving into a Palm Beach County road on 1 November was dismissed on X as AI-generated. PolitiFact and Lead Stories checked the claims and found the video authentic, while a second, sharper image of the wreck appears to have been altered with AI tools.¹²

Why it matters: the case shows detection tools being used in both directions in one event. A single AI-detector score was used to call real footage fake, while an AI-cleaned still was passed off as a real photo.¹²

Driving the news:

• The Learjet 60 was flying from Austin to the Bahamas when it crashed on a street in Palm Beach County at about 12:51 p.m. ET, and all nine people on board were killed.¹³⁴
• X posts shared screen recordings of Hive Moderation scans of the clip, reporting that it detected AI-generated content.¹
• PolitiFact says Hive Moderation is imperfect and that it did not flag the original footage as AI-generated or manipulated when PolitiFact submitted it.¹
• PolitiFact traced the clip to Aki Kuusisto, a digital creator from West Palm Beach, who first posted it on Facebook. It says The Associated Press, CNN, CBS News and the BBC shared the same footage.¹ The BBC also carries the dashcam video.³
• Lead Stories examined a separate image showing the plane with a missing wing, a deformed engine without its cowling and a bent tail. Google's SynthID detection tool found a watermark that it attributed to editing or generation with OpenAI tools, and frozen frames from the video show both wings.²

The big picture: Darren Linvill of Clemson University's Media Forensics Hub told PolitiFact that people are right to be sceptical of viral video as AI improves, but that some now disbelieve the truth, a pattern known as the "liar's dividend".¹ PolitiFact reports Linvill saying that one of the X accounts questioning the footage has been amplified by bot accounts promoting narratives from Storm-1516, a Russian campaign.¹

The other side: the crash itself is still under investigation. The BBC reports that investigators say the aircraft may have broken apart before the crash, that ice and turbulence were factors, and that the probable cause is still to be determined.⁴ The BBC's written report still describes the social media dashcam clip as unverified.⁴ PolitiFact does not say who made the Hive Moderation screen recordings.¹

Single-source note: the claim that the original clip passes AI detection rests on PolitiFact's own run of Hive Moderation, which it calls imperfect. The SynthID result in the Lead Stories check applies to the still image only and says nothing about the video.¹²