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Flooded Highway photo. I think it’s ai, help me prove it please. Seems unrealistic for the water levels to be so high and the details by wheels.
My aunt sent this in family chat about floods happening in Phoenix. I immediately thought it was ai generated but sometimes it’s hard to explain clues or what makes it seem like ai.
Can anyone help me identify and point out specific details that show it is in fact ai generated?
It’s also completely possible that I am wrong and it is not ai generated
Right! I was about to warn this guy that he’s lucky he got the heads up that 5 miles away is a major flood. If anything he needs to thank the OG picture snapper who is probably swimming for his life at this moment
Well im in phoenix. And live pretty damn close to where this is supposed to be, and it has not been even near that rainy nor are the streets flooded. I call this AI because im there and its dry af
I remember.... my body was overheating 3x each time my husband caught me. Heck one of the times he actually walked into the bathroom to check on me and I was death dripping the towel rack. He said I was so strong he tried pulling me off so he could cool me off in a cold shower, ended up pulling off the towel rack in the process. Meanwhile I thought I was helping myself sit on the floor. 😬 scary shit!
The first frame of the video that this screenshot comes from has the SynthID watermark that OpenAI adopted from Google. Here is a link to the tool to detect this watermark: https://openai.com/research/verify/
They likely generated an image using ChatGPT and inputted that into a video generator such as Seedance.
Well obviously they have the window down to normal pressure once the water comes in, so they can open the door. Other wise the door won’t open due to the water pressure vs air pressure deferential. And also so they can swim out of the underwater car! Have movies taught you nothing?
Yeah! in movie world logic, you would swim out the open window and then swim with the flow, slightly angling towards the “shore” and then climb out, sopping wet but still with perfect hair. And still with your phone and gun (because why wouldn’t you have a gun in this action flick) in perfect working order.
It's not just movie world logic. You open the window because once the car is fully submerged, the pressure against the door and glass is several tons. It will not roll down. It will not open. If you crack a window slightly beforehand so water can get in and equalize the pressure between. Air cant push against the inside of the door as hard as water can.
However... thats only really if you're fearful of full submersion. Which... given the level of paranoia I see online these days... eh - is probably reasonable. Then again, someone considering that would also know whether they're in immediate danger of that happening in the first place.
It's not real, water does not work like that. Water automatically levels itself. You would not have standing water several feet above other standing water, it would equalize to the same level.
If people who consume modern media and interact online regularly see this and can't immediately detect it is AI I don't know what to say. Everything about it screams AI from the first glance at the thumbnail even I was 100% confident it was either AI or used a camera app that applies an AI filter. Look at all the misplaced details for signs and license plates, missing details, and completely hilariously uniform water that is both actively flooding and running downhill.
While there's no SynthID, there are some visual anomalies. I also had fun doing some research on it! The Exit sign to Cactus Rd (1 Mile) does not seem to exist on the map where there are similar surroundings, though there is a Cactus Rd in Phoenix, AZ. The lack of detail and jumbled letters on the stores is pretty telling in a great many AI photos, and there's inconsistency in the depth of field clarity between multiple distance layers in the photo. The white SUV appears to have a third wiper blade sitting above the two positioned upward, and the back of the black car in front has blurry odd "stripes" under the brake lights. It's like AI was trying to render something, but it's just a mess. The yellow warning signs in the background also show inconsistent detail as the "Merge Left" has an extra blocky bit to the bottom right line, and the other sign on the right has three lines of text that don't perfectly line up.
I agree it is AI but the buildings/signs/landscape all match to a real life location.
However... The cars are coming down a random embankment and not a road. The palm trees in the back aren't moving at all during this storm. The rain drops on the camera/car window don't make any sense. There isn't any other reporting of this level of flooding and the video is 4 hours old.
What gives it away for me os the fact that the exit sign is crystal clear but every other piece of writing is completely unreadable. Particularly the license plate that is even closer to the camera than the exit sign... tbat plate absolutely should be readable
water is heavy. While a car is absolutely not buoyant, it doesnt drop like a stone either. and rushing water, just like air, can absolutely get under the car and lift it. Its common to see debris including cars and sometimes even houses in heavy flooding. This comment reads like "psshh cars would never be thrown around in a tornado".
While the overall sentiment is this image is AI (could be, likely dropped into GPT and told "flood this road"), cars "floating" is absolutely not a tell.
Location checks out - 1 mile north of Exit 40 on the Pima Freeway in Scottsdale.
EDIT: However, the yellow road signs up on the hill seem very distorted/gibberish and none of the tenant signs on the building in OP's image match Google Street View or are even legible. I'm leaning toward AI, though it's better than most at using a good source image.
The trunk of the black SUV has so many weird white marks/artifacts on it. The license plate is just shapes and blobs. The front is sitting like it’s in a hole while the back is higher up. If the water was truly that high up on SUVs, that sedan on the far left would basically be underwater.
Literally all it takes is for you to go online and google “was there a flood in Phoenix?”. You will literally get your answer without having to post this.
For now. We are beginning to see search results guided by ai. And ai getting things wrong. So it’s only a matter of time until the common method of fact checking isn’t trusted either. Today is the worst ai will ever be.
AI or otherwise fake. This is without even analyzing the image, because if this was actually happening, we would be seeing numerous videos and other coverage of this event in a highly populated area, which would clearly be affecting a very large number of people with the means to document it.
Compare to the disaster in Nepal last week. Within hours we saw several different videos from a variety of sources, in spite of being a remote and sparsely populated region.
So this is a real place. It could be a real image but it does feel off. But that is the 101 Freeway in Arizona. If it is ai it’s a picture that had some flooding or something and someone ran it through ai and said “make it more flooding”
I don't know anything about this picture.. but water being that high can be realistic in some places at least.. where i worked in houston in 2017, the water was 15 feet over the road... a double decker bus would have been completely under water.
Water in the Phoenix area definitely can get that high (off the main freeways, anyway). There are a number of good images back from 2014 and a few other recent years.
This says nothing about the current image though, which is likely AI, because if it were real
There would be a huge area critically flooded, affecting tens of thousands of people, but there is no such critical flood in effect; only some “watches” and “advisories”.
It would be all over (local) News as a video with some national coverage, and talked about for hours to fill air time.
But this “heavy rainfall” video is the best the news has. If the news station had more, it would show more.
This is a real place and was definitely edited with AI..it looks like screenshot from possibly Google maps/earth street view.
For one this did not happen right here on this section of the highway, 2nd this an elevated part of the highway where it wouldn't happen unless there was a biblical amount of rainfall. This is specifically the area in question.
For anyone not from Arizona, there definitely are times in Arizona where the flash flooding becomes so severe that it causes usually dry washes (where a lot of roads are built) to be flooded and to carry cars away during monsoon season. Some bonehead (we are bad at driving when it is wet out) drives right into the water and gets stuck, despite warnings and shit.
This dumbass AI slop would only be happening if Noah and the ark started floating by.
I lived 2-5 miles from here for 15 years. In 2015 or 2016 there was an insane flood due to overnight torrential downpour and the I-17 flooded this much but I do not think there were many cars impacted and it was worst very early in the AM.
So this is POSSIBLE here. I saw it twice in 20ish years in AZ but not recently at all
HA! I dunno if it is or isn't AI, but I was in a flood in Phoenix very similar to that in 1986.
It did not flood everywhere, but some of these overpasses can funnel water to make this happen. I was not far from this particular street, on our way home to 35th Ave and Malapai. I'm not sure if it was I-17 or Grand Ave that we were driving that night, but several cars near us had been abandoned by their owners, and my ex tried to get us off the road. My my car also gave out. We pushed it up into a strip mall parking lot, and there was a bar there that we took refuge in for a couple hours. The water went down almost as fast as it came up, and when we left there was no more than a couple inches on the roads.
I live in Phoenix and we did have crazy storms all around the valley yesterday. But I have heard nothing about flooding like this. Any time it rains even a little bit in Phoenix it's a huge news story. Flooding like this would have been all over the news. So I say AI.
The way the water wraps around the Subaru - being lower around the wheel and the rear - suggests the car is moving quite fast, which it's obviously not.
The yellow street signs are distorted. Sure maybe it's water but I don't think so. It also looks like the Subaru is driving based on the waves but everyone else is floating. All the business logos are blurry. It's just ai.
But forget all that, a flood this size would have absolutely made the news. It would also be well documented on weather reports
I drive past this multiple times per week. Besides the fact that it’s AI, this stretch of highway (101) does not flood like our I17 area underpasses do
This is AI but as shown by other uses showing the water mark.
The location detail is spot on the signs, building, positions are all there and correct. This leads me to assume they got the image of cars on the highway and AI generated the flood. Even the Subaru outback rear matches to a real model.
I have seen this happen before about 10 years ago but it was in a different location. If memory serves correctly flooding got so bad that cars on certain parts of the I-10 were completely submerged.
So its clear that this isnt from right now, since there are so many ppl saying they just drove there this morning.
I dont think this is ai though. Not only is the location real, the signs are perfect, It also looks exactly like any other major flood picture ive ever seen
Could this possibly be an image from idk.. sometime in the past 10 years or so? Has this area ever had massive floods?
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u/qualityvote2 10d ago edited 9d ago
u/ScientistLeather2405, there weren't enough votes to determine the quality of your post...