Never heard of the Great Cascadia 9.1 Earthquake of 2001, or the USSR’s Blue Plague Incident? That’s because they never happened. People are creating records of fake historical events using AI.
The Midjourney subreddit is being flooded with images that depict images of historical events like “The infamous Blue Plague Incident” that occurred in the 1970s in the Soviet Union, the “July 2012 solar superstorm and blackout” in the U.S., and “The 2001 Great Cascadia 9.1 Earthquake & Tsunami” that devastated the West Coast of North America. The catch is: These are all AI-generated images and none of these events have ever occurred.
Redditors, using Midjourney high capabilities to create hyper-realistic images, are creating images that are realistic on many fronts, such as imitating the photo quality of a certain era and putting celebrities and politicians in different scenarios. Many of these fake historical events are based on real-life events, and the creators refer to them as “what-if” warnings.
Users responded to a series of fake images depicting “staging the moon landing, 1969” with concerns about how Midjourney and other text-to-image generators can be weaponized by conspiracy theorists to spread false historical information. The creator argued that mocking the conspiracy theorists is the main goal, getting the inside-chatter into open-air will actually quiet them down.
The tech’s capabilities and accessibility have vastly outpaced regulatory and legislative responses, as well as corporate controls. Eliot Higgins, the founder of the open-source investigative outlet Bellingcat, when reading about the expected indictment of Donald Trump decided he wanted to visualize what “Donald Trump falling down while being arrested” would look like. Two days later, his posts depicting an event that never happened have been viewed nearly 5 million times, creating a case study in the increasing sophistication of AI-generated images, the ease with which they can be deployed and their potential to create confusion in volatile news environments. The episode also makes evident the absence of corporate standards or government regulation addressing the use of AI to create and spread falsehoods.
