On August 16, 2025, India celebrated Janmashtami, commemorating the birth anniversary of Lord Srikrishna. In this context, the video showing that he was being fed to a Gath in Varanasi under police officers on the eve of Srikrishnajangmashtami has gone viral on social media platforms (here, here, here). It is shared as if depicting a real incident. Screenshots of this viral video are also in circulation, claiming to show the “vanalasadya” (east feast for the monkeys” offered at the Sridharmasasta Temple in Sustancotta, Column District. This article will fact-check the truth behind this video.
Claim: This video shows a monkey being fed to a Gath in Varanasi under police officers on the eve of Srikrishnajangmashtami.
fact: The viral video does not depict the actual incident. AI is generated. In the video, some visual inconsistencies commonly found in deep-fark or AI-generated content are observed. Additionally, AI content detection tools such as Hive and Google's SynthID have flagged the virus video as having AI generated. Therefore, the claim made in the post is error.
A related keyword search was conducted on Google to see if a monkey had been fed to Gath in Varanasi on the eve of Srikrishnajangmashtami under police officers, but no such reports were found. I looked into the viral video and noticed some contradictions. The movements of the police officers and monkeys looked unnatural and unrealistic. For example, there is a clear contradiction in the visuals where police officers hold both their rifles and flags. Such anomalies are commonly seen in AI-generated videos or deep furcake videos (here and here), suggesting that this video may have been created using AI.
To further determine whether viral videos were generated by AI, we analyzed them using AI content detection tools such as Hive and Google's SynthID. The hive showed that there is a 99.9% chance that the video will be generated by AI. Similarly, Google's SynthID tool (a platform designed to detect content created by AI models) confirmed that the video was actually generated using Google AI. Based on this evidence, it is clear that the virus video has been generated by AI and does not portray the actual incident.
Several posts featuring screenshots of this viral video have also gone viral, claiming to show the “vanalasadia” (the east feast of the monkeys) offered at the Sridharmasasta Temple in Sustancotta, Column district. It is true that the Threedalmasasta Temple in Sastancotta, Kerala performs “Vanarasadia”, but the east feast feast that was fed to the monkeys on the grounds during Onam (here, here, here, here), circulating photos of AI occurring.
In summary, this viral video has been generated by AI showing that monkeys fed to the Ghats of Varanasi under police officers in Janmashtami are being fed to the AI.
