Does a viral video show alleged Muslim crowds attending Hajj 2026? No, that's not true: An AI-Generated Content Detection tool concluded the video was 95.5% likely made by AI. It contained a watermark pointing to a specific generative video model.
The claim appeared in a post (archived here) published by @dom_lucre on X on May 26, 2026. It opened:
🔥🚨DEVELOPING: The jaw dropping size of the attendance of Muslims during Hajj 2026 has led to many viewers across the world questioning what the word will look like in 100 years with this growing population.
This is what a thumbnail from the attached video looked like on X at the time of writing:
(Image source: post by @dom_lucre on X.)
Hajj is a multi-day Muslim pilgrimage to the city of Mecca in Saudi Arabia. In 2026, it began on May 25. According to the Associated Press (archived here), more than 1.5 million people traveled to participate in the ceremonies. However, the viral clip was not authentic footage of Hajj 2026.
AI detection tool Hive Moderation said that it was 95.5% likely that the clip was made by AI:
(Image source: Hive Moderation.)
Google's "About this image" tab confirmed: The video was generated by Google AI:
(Image source: Google.)
Gemini -- one of Google's AI models capable of detecting SynthID, a specific watermark (archived here) embedded in AI-generated content -- found such a watermark in the thumbnail from the video in question:
(Image source: Gemini.)
A closer manual examination of the clip showed that its bottom right corner displayed a barely visible logo of Veo (archived here and here), Google's AI video-generating model:
(Image source: post by @dom_lucre on X.)
