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

In January 2025, photos and videos of the famous Hollywood Hills sign engulfed in flames appeared on social media. We have verified the accuracy of these images.

In early January, the media and social network users reported that large fires that engulfed Los Angeles damaged, among other things, one of the city’s main attractions—the Hollywood sign in the Hollywood Hills. Edition "New news” published an article on this topic with the headline “Fire reached the Hollywood sign: third day of fires in Los Angeles.” A video that allegedly shows a burning sign published YouTube channel “Wrath of the Earth” (943,000 views at the time of writing this analysis). Similar videos, as well as photographs, were shared by Telegram channels “Putin on Telegram"(191,000 views), TrendWatching (125,000), "Pool N3"(88,000), "Voice of Israel | Israel war news" (85,000), etc., as well as users "VKontakte", TikTok, Instagram And Facebook.

January 7 Los Angeles authorities announced a state of emergency against the backdrop of forest fires that engulfed certain areas of the city and surrounding areas. According to official data, by January 13, 24 people became victims of the disaster, about 180,000 local residents were evacuated, the fire destroyed approximately 10,000 buildings. Especially strong suffered the Pacific Palisades area in the north of the city, where many Hollywood stars have their homes. For a week, firefighters, despite efforts made, still could not cope with the fire, which, due to strong winds, was rapidly spreading to new territories.

Photos of the burning Hollywood sign, the hallmark of the American film industry, became a popular illustration of news stories about these fires. First they started sharing English-speaking users, and then the footage spread around the world. Some have published video hill on fire. “Verified” was able to discover three photographs and two videos of the burning inscription, which were taken from different angles and were most widely distributed on the Internet.

In reality, these pictures and videos published on the Internet are just the fruit of the work of artificial intelligence (AI). So, on one of the viral images the logo is visible xAI - an American company that in 2023 founded entrepreneur Elon Musk.

xAI is mainly developing the generative chatbot Grok, a multimodal AI that is integrated into the X social network and allows you to create images and text. How asserts Musk himself, Grok has a sense of humor and direct access to tweets on the businessman's platform. In December 2024, the Grok website appeared announcement, that the company is going to expand the capabilities of its model by adding the Aurora module for image generation. On December 8, 2024, several X users published the first pictures, generated by Aurora, but after just a few hours the tool disappeared from the platform. By messages some US media outlets, the model was turned off due to a lack of restrictions on generating images of celebrities (for example, it did not refuse to create an image of a bloody Donald Trump, although such requests should be rejected due to restrictions on violent content). The next day Aurora became again available X users from some countries.

In another case, the work of neural networks is revealed by another detail - an error in the spelling of the word Hollywood, at the end of which a second letter d appeared.

Judging by online broadcasts from CCTV cameras of the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, located near the installation, at the time of writing this analysis, the famous inscription was not damaged by fires. Los Angeles authorities also did not announce the fire at the landmark.

The earliest "Verified" publication discovered that contained a video of the burning inscription, appeared January 9, 2025 at 09:20 Moscow time on the grammysammytiktok blog on TikTok. This user specializes in creating videos using neural networks. The next day other users started publish their creations, also generated by AI and showing the Hollywood sign on fire. In terms of photos, the earliest post we found was posted on X by Value & Time at 07:47 January 9, 2025.

Thus, the viral images of the burning Hollywood sign that spread across social networks were generated by neural networks. The very fact of the fire is refuted by recordings from surveillance cameras installed near the attraction. At the time of writing this analysis, Los Angeles authorities had not reported that the fires had reached the installation.

Cover photo: social networks

Fake

What do our verdicts mean?

Read on topic:

1. Meduza. Why were the Los Angeles fires so devastating?
2. BBC. Fire in Los Angeles in maps and photographs
3. RBC. Grok AI: how Elon Musk's neural network works