Featured Image Credit: Reddit/r/arctic_chilean
Topics: Technology, Weather, Weird, Reddit
Rhiannon Ingle
Topics: Technology, Weather, Weird, Reddit
People have been totally fooled into thinking that a devastating natural disaster took place over two decades ago.
Photos of the fictitious earthquake reported to have hit Oregon back in the early 2000s have since been confirmed as fake.
Instead, the doctored images are simply the result of artificial intelligence and couldn't be further from the truth.
Advert
The photos were first posted to the 'Midjourney' sub-Reddit earlier this week (23 March).
The series of twenty different shots were titled: "The 2001 Great Cascadia 9.1 Earthquake & Tsunami - Pacific Coast of US/Canada."
Photos included scenes of rubble, collapsed bridges, worried families, news reporters and even former President George W Bush amid all the destruction.
Totally realistic - pixels and all - many were shocked to find out that the photos were completely fake.
Dozens of people have since flocked to the post's comment section to share their reactions to the AI con.
Some found the whole situation totally bizarre.
"Was I the only one who was like 'How come I don't remember this happening?' until seeing the subreddit?" one person admitted.
A second replied: "Me too dude. I thought was I living under a rock or something that I didn’t hear about this."
"This is what insanity is made of," claimed a third.
Others, however, took the opportunity to highlight the issues with 'misinformation'.
One Reddit user commented: "People in 2025 are going to have a real difficult time with misinformation.
"People in 2100 won't know which parts of history were real..."
Another pointed out: "If people today are already easily misled by social media posts containing nothing but text - what will image and video of perfect quality do? Do you think they'll check the source?"
"We already don't know what parts of history are real. I think now we have a real difficult time with misinformation," a third echoed.
The thread has already left Reddit and is now making the rounds on Twitter.
One verified Twitter user, Justine Moore, posted that 'something wild' was currently going round on the platform.
"People are telling stories and sharing photos of historic events," the tweet continued.
Such events included the 'Great Cascadia' - an earthquake that supposedly 'devastated' Oregon back in 2001.
But, she explained to her followers, the evidence was far from authentic, as the decades-old event never actually happened.
Some weren't so easily fooled by the AI-constructed images with one Twitter user stating: "It's pretty obvious since none of these look like real people even slightly."
Justine then replied: "You don’t think these look real?? With the exception of the kid’s hand that has 7 fingers, it all looks pretty real to me…"
Us too, Justine, us too.