Is a video of a two-year-old running to their soldier dad authentic? No, that's not true: A detection tool flagged the video with a 99.7% probability of being AI-generated. Lead Stories did not find any version of the video that included identifiable information about the toddler or their family.
The claim appeared in a post (archived here) published on X on March 30, 2026. The caption read:
A 2-year-old's love for solider Dad ❤️
This is how the video included in the post on X looked at the time of writing:
(Image source: post by @SathishLin93531 on X.)
On April 1, 2026, Lead Stories used the Hive Moderation AI-Generated Content Detection tool and it concluded the video was 99.7% "likely to be AI-generated":
(Image source: Hive Moderation.)
Other visual clues indicate that the video is AI-generated. The hand of the person holding the phone to the left of the video transforms throughout the video. A tall person walks rapidly toward to the soldiers while everyone else is standing behind a rope. The soldier dad, who would have seen the toddler running over, passes the child before stopping abruptly in an unnatural manner to give him a hug. It is also hard to discern any facial features, particularly the mouth expressions that would go along with the words being said by the toddler and the dad and the lack of expressions by the other soldiers. A screenshot below highlights some of these anomalies.
(Image source: post by @SathishLin93531 on X. Red circles added by Lead Stories.)
Reverse image searches of a video screenshot using Google Images (archived here), TinEye (archived here), Yandex (archived here), returned no matching results, providing no evidence that real people appeared in the video.
