As many readers of The Daily Grail, I grew up as a child obsessed with Cryptozoology. Aside from the hunt of animals considered by mainstream naturalists to be extinct—like the Tasmanian tiger— or entirely fictitious—like Bigfoot or Nessie—the idea of giant versions of known animals hidden in the unexplored regions of the world, both excited me and terrified me at the same time.
One special chapter in the reports of giant animals I read when I was a kid was the one referring to giant snakes purportedly observed by foreign travelers sojourning the basins of the Amazon river. Anacondas are the largest snake in the world, said to grow as large as 9 meters (30 feet) long, and in 2024 a television crew had the fortune of filming a magnificent green specimen underwater which was 6.3 meters (20.8 feet) long, making it the largest anaconda ever recorded in the wild.
That same specimen was subsequently killed by poachers, which highlights how despite their menacing appearance, these enormous creatures are more at risk from us than we from them—unless you’re Jon Voight I guess…
The snake in the 1997 film Anaconda was part animatronic and part CGI, but a new viral video making the rounds on social media seems to show a snake so incredibly massive, the first reaction of most commenters is to assume it was created using A.I.
According to the info shared by several accounts on Instagram, the video had been recorded in the rain forest of Ecuador, and the massive creature was said to be visible from the air due to the low level of the river during a drought.
The first red herring in the video is its brevity, which is a staple of imagery generated using large language models (LLMs) like Dall-E or ChatGPT. After being shared by several news services in Latin America as authentic, the video was shown to Spanish herpetologist Ignacio J. De La Riva, who declared it fake and pointed to the lack of references which makes trying to make an estimate of the animal’s size impossible. Even if the snake was 9 meters (30 feet) long, as some claim, “the proportion between length and thickness of the body does not look believable in the images,” the expert said.
Analyzing the video myself, I notice that at the beginning there appears to be a second head protruding from the first ‘hoop’ in the snake’s body, but by 00:06 it disappears. Some comments in Instagram suggest the video shows two snakes instead of one, but I think it is safer to assume the extra head was just a temporary artifact, accidentally inserted by the AI when it generated the fake video; just like the extra arms or morphing heads we commonly see in these type of artificial imagery.
So there you have it: Unfortunately yet another proof that you can’t trust anything found on the Internet at face value. I still love the idea of giant 15 meter-long snakes lurking in the bottom of some untouched Amazon tributary, but if movies like Anaconda and The Shape of Water have taught us anything, is that perhaps the best thing for these mythical creatures is to remain undiscovered.
