Fact-Check: Video of Monkeys Being Scared of Fireworks Is AI-Generated

The video is an AI-generated one and doesn't show real visuals of monkeys.

A video, appearing to show two grown monkeys and one infant monkey sitting in a balcony and getting scared while fireworks go off has gone viral on social media.

• The video is being shared to elicit compassion and empathy, asking people to keep the voiceless in mind during Diwali.

At the time of writing this report, this post by X user Akhilesh Yadav had garnered over 15 lakh views.

(Archived versions of more posts sharing this claim can be seen here, here, here, and here.)

But...?: The video is an AI-generated one.

How do we know?: We ran a reverse image search on the viral video, which led us to a Facebook post which shared the same video.

• This one, however, carried an 'AI content' label.

• Additionally, we also came across a Reddit post sharing the video, where one commenter had shared the link to a Facebook post, identifying it as the source.

• We noticed that this post, by user 'Love.nature.48' was the clearest version of the clip, as well as the oldest one, shared on 1 November 2026.

This video also carried the 'AI content' label, but showed that it was labelled so by the person originally sharing the content.

When we went through the page, we noticed that it only shared AI-generated videos of animals, with the one in the claim being its most viewed one.

When we ran the viral video through Hive Moderation's AI-generated content detector, it noted an 88.8 percent likelihood of the video being so.

Conclusion: An AI-generated video of three monkeys being scared of fireworks has gone viral on social media, where users believed it to be a real video.

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