Grok wrongly claims footage of Glasgow fire shows blaze in Tel Aviv
Genuine imagery of a huge fire which destroyed a building near Glasgow Central Station has been repeatedly misidentified by Grok, the AI chatbot created by Elon Musk’s start-up xAI. It told users that video footage of the fire actually showed an incident in Tel Aviv, and insisted a real photo of the blaze was made with artificial intelligence.
When asked about a video of the Glasgow fire, posted on X with a caption wrongly claiming it showed “firefighting efforts” in Tel Aviv, Grok incorrectly said the footage showed “firefighters tackling a major blaze in a Tel Aviv building”.
However, Grok was wrong—the footage actually showed a fire near Glasgow Central Station. We’ve matched the clip to a video posted by Vyro Media, which was also used by the BBC.
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Misidentified photo
When asked by another user if a photo from the scene in Glasgow was real, Grok incorrectly, and repeatedly, insisted it was AI-generated.
Again, Grok was wrong to claim this. We geolocated the scene to a street near Glasgow Central Station and matched details from the photo to other reports and images from the scene. The AI chatbot has since apologised and accepted it misidentified the video.
We have contacted xAI for comment, and will update this article if we hear back.
We’ve written many times about AI chatbots and assistants struggling to correctly verify images and videos. Last year we wrote about Grok and Google Lens AI overviews claiming that fake imagery showed the Huntingdon train attack, and Grok wrongly claiming that a video of the 2025 ‘Unite the Kingdom’ rally was filmed in 2020.