People Are Using AI to Create World Events That Never Happened

Fears about AI setting the world on fire, breaking down our ability to discern truth from fiction, and wiping out millions of jobs aren’t entirely misplaced.

By Peter Rapine

Published 2 years ago in Facepalm


Fears about AI setting the world on fire, breaking down our ability to discern truth from fiction, and wiping out millions of jobs aren’t entirely misplaced. However, that future - a future where people lack media literacy, lose their jobs to automation and fall further into realistic fantasies of their own creation - isn’t a by-product of AI. It’s a reality that is already here and has been for some time.


So far, AI is pretty good at writing articles (I am not a computer I promise). It can edit videos, color-correct those videos, make voiceovers for those videos and even watch those videos if it wants to. AI can make some pretty amazing images too, that is if you don’t need people in them with realistic-looking fingers. And while we’ve covered the horny implications of this, the drip-plications and the less serious implications, we now focus on the historical implications of AI imagining world events and natural disasters that never happened. 




On the subreddit, r/midjourney, you’ll find plenty of examples of people using Midjourney, an AI-generation image tool to create images of presidents meeting aliens, granny uprisings, and warrior selfies. AI, like a knife or a calculator, is simply a tool, and as such, it’s only as good, or as dangerous, as the person wielding it.



But what has caught our attention has been how fast these ai-generated images have gone from “clearly fake” to “yo, look how dripped out the pope is.” A side effect of this is we can now look back on “historical events” that people cooked up entirely in their heads.



Could these images be predictive by nature? Meaning, could there one day be a major earthquake on the Cascadia fault line, causing freeways to collapse, or when aliens finally do arrive, are they holding press conferences with American presidents? Probably, yeah.


So whether this fascination with imagining an alternative reality speaks to our displeasure with the world we currently live in, or the world we may one day inhabit, we know the power of imagination has never been more important than it is today. And likewise, the ability to discern what is real and what isn’t. 

Categories:

Facepalm Wow History News

Tags:

midjourney world events fake history fake historical events natural disasters cascade earthquake
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