Video actually shows white “baby peacock”?

Social media users claimed a video shared on X and TikTok in September 2024 showed a real “baby peacock” with fluffy white feathers and large black eyes.

An X post containing the clip had amassed more than 57,000 views as of this writing, while another user shared the video with the Subtitles: “This beautiful baby peacock made my heart smile.”

However, the footage was fake. The same video was posted to X on at least two other occasions in September 2024, with users noting that it was created using artificial intelligence.

(X/Snopes compilation)

The video contained six short clips of the alleged “baby peacock,” and in each of them there were subtle differences, such as: B. the number of flared toes, the color and shape of parts of its plume, and the existence or non-existence of a peacock's second feather on its head. In some of the short clips, as seen in the main image of this article, the peacock even had a different number of toes on each foot. All this proved that the video was fake.

Hive Moderation, a website that detects AI-generated media, concluded that there was a 98.5% chance that the footage contained “AI-generated or deepfake content.”

(Hive Moderation AI-generated content recognition)

A similar video, which had amassed more than 4.3 million views on The X post pointed out that this clip was also created with AI. The

Baby peacocks don't have fully grown tails, nor are they pristinely white, as the first video shows – and they're not even called peacocks. According to the San Diego Zoo, the term “peacock” is only accurate when identifying males of this species. The females are called peahens, the entire group is called peacocks, and the babies are called peachhens. A group of the animal is called a “group” or “pride.”

There are three types of peacocks: green, Congo and Indian peacocks, with the latter being the most common in zoos.

“The Indian peacock has some of the brightest feathers, but the peahen is a drab, mottled brown in comparison. The male needs his bright feathers to attract a mate, and the female needs to be able to blend in with the bushes to keep predators away. “I cannot see her while she is incubating her eggs,” the zoo wrote.

As Snopes reported in 2023, the Los Angeles County Arboretum and Botanical Garden wrote that peach cows have a “brown mottled” color even at about two months of age.

For example, the children's zoo at Walton Hall Gardens in England released the following photo of a peach chick in 2019:

The Montgomery Zoo in Alabama also posted a photo of a cream-colored peach chick on its Instagram account in May 2023:

Neither of the above two images resembled the fake baby peacock depicted in the AI-generated video in question.

Snopes has addressed numerous rumors about wild birds, including a true claim that a video published in August 2024 showed a pair of flamingos feeding bright red liquid to a chick, and a false claim that a photo shared in January 2024 showed a red and white “pajama bird.”