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

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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.An archived version of this post can be seen here.At the time of writing this report, this post by X user Akhilesh Yadav had garnered over 15 lakh views.(Archived versions of more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.Fact-Check: Does This Video Show Recent Diwali Celebrations in Dubai? No!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.The video has 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.The tool noted a possibility of the video being made using Seedance.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.Old Video Shared as Recent Clip of Khalistanis Clashing With Hindus in Canada(Not convinced of a post or information you came across online and want it verified? Send us the details on WhatsApp at 9540511818 , or e-mail it to us at webqoof@thequint.com and we'll fact-check it for you. You can also read all our fact-checked stories here.)