Is it true that, due to fires in Los Angeles, the Hollywood sign caught fire?

In January 2025, photos and videos of the famous inscription on Hollywood hills covered by flame appeared on social networks. We checked the reliability of these personnel.

In early January, the media and social networks reported that large fires that covered Los Angeles damaged one of the main city attractions-the Hollywood inscription on Hollywood hills. Edition "New news"Published on this subject an article with the heading" Fire got to the Hollywood sign: the third day of fires in Los Angeles. " A video on which a burning inscription is supposedly visible, Published YouTube channel “The Anger of the Earth” (943,000 views at the time of writing this analysis). TELEGRAM channels shared with similar videos, as well as photographsPutin in Telegram"(191 000 views), Trendwatching (125,000), "Pool N3"(88 000),"The voice of Israel | Israel war news"(85,000) and others, as well as users"VKontakte" Tiktok, Instagram And Facebook.

January 7 Los Angeles authorities announced Emergency position against the background of forest fires, covering individual areas of the city and the surroundings. By official data, 24 people became victims of disaster by January 13, about 180,000 local residents were evacuated, the fire destroyed about 10,000 buildings. Especially strong injured The Pasifik-Palyseids area in the north of the city, where the houses of many Hollywood stars are located. Firefighters in a week, despite The efforts made, still could not cope with the fire, which, due to strong winds, rapidly covered new territories.

Photos of the burning inscription of Hollywood, the business card of the American film industry, have become a popular illustration of news about these fires. First with them They started to share English -speaking users, and then personnel spread around the world. Some published and video Fire hills. “Verified” managed to find three pictures and two videos of a burning inscription, which were made from different angles and spread most widely on the Internet.

In fact, these pictures and videos published on the Internet are just the fruit of artificial intelligence (AI). So, on one of the viral images, the logo is noticeable Xai - The American company, which in 2023 Founded Entrepreneur Ilon Musk.

Basically, XII is developing a generative GROK chatbot-multimodal AI, which is integrated into the social network X and allows you to create images and text. How claims Mask itself, Grok has a sense of humor and direct access to tweets on a platform businessman. In December 2024, the GROK website appeared announcementthat the company is going to expand the capabilities of its model by adding the Aurora module to generate images. December 8, 2024, several users of X published the first Pictures, generated by Aurora, but after only a few hours the tool disappeared from the platform. By messages Some American media, the model was disabled due to the lack of restrictions in generating celebrity images (for example, she did not refuse to create an image of the bloodied Donald Trump, although such requests should deviate due to restrictions on violent content). The next day, Aurora became again Available users X from some countries.

In another case, the work of neural networks is given by another detail - a mistake in writing the word Hollywood, at the end of which the second letter D appeared.

Judging by Online broadcasts From the cameras of the department of forestry and the fire protection of California, located nearby with the installation, at the time of writing this analysis, the famous inscription from fires did not suffer. The Los Angeles authorities also did not declare the ignition of sights.

The earliest of the discovered "verified" publications that contained a video of a burning inscription, appeared January 9, 2025 at 09:20 Moscow time on the GramMYSAMMYTIKTOK blog in Tiktok. This user specializes in creating rollers using neural networks. The next day, other users began publish Your creations, also generated AI and showing the Hollywood sign on fire. As for the photographs, the earliest publication we found was posted in the X user Value & Time at 07:47 January 9, 2025.

Thus, the viral images of the burning inscription Hollywood, which were dispersed through social networks, were generated by neuralities. The fact of the fire refutes the recordings from surveillance cameras established near the attraction. At the time of writing this analysis, Los Angeles authorities did not report that fires had reached the installation.

Photo on the cover: social networks

Fake

What do our verdicts mean?

Read on the topic:

1. Meduza. Why did the fires in Los Angeles be so destructive?
2. BBC. Fire in Los Angeles in maps and photos
3. RBC. GROK AI: How does the neural network Ilona Mask work