AI-generated images can give a fictional scene the look of evidence. Once an image leaves the context where it was made, viewers may see it without the joke, explanation or community discussion that would tell them it is false.
When a joke starts to feel real
Tumblr users once built an elaborate shared story around “Goncharov,” a supposed Martin Scorsese film from 1973 starring Robert De Niro and Al Pacino. The film did not exist, but users’ collaborative posts and documents made its invented history feel convincing. Scorsese himself joined the joke.
That kind of collective world-building now has a visual counterpart. Image generators can quickly turn an idea into scenes that look like photographs. People can then share those images with little context, allowing a fiction to reach audiences who were never part of the original joke.
The risk depends in part on how plausible the premise looks. A deliberately surreal parody may signal its own fiction. A scene resembling a real event can be much harder to recognize as invented, especially when it appears in a feed alongside ordinary posts.
Images travel farther than their context
When Midjourney opened access to its Midjourney 5 model, its realistic images spread online. Among them were fake pictures of Donald Trump being arrested and running from police officers. Eliot Higgins, founder of Bellingcat, generated the images, and his initial tweets indicated he was experimenting with AI. But the pictures circulated without that explanation.
Other viral images were more comic. A generated image of Pope Francis II wearing a white Balenciaga coat drew wide attention; one tweet about it was viewed over 26 million times. Chrissy Teigen later said she had thought the jacket was real and had not questioned it.
Video makers have also combined generated images with synthetic speech and animation. A creator using the name demonflyingfox made “Harry Potter by Balenciaga,” a parody advertisement in which artificial versions of characters from the franchise speak about Balenciaga. He told TechCrunch that he aims to make the videos strange enough that viewers will not mistake them for reality. He also said he used Midjourney 4 so the characters would look less realistic.
These examples show how the same tools can produce obvious jokes or images that seem plausible at a glance. The creator’s intent and the image’s original setting may not travel with it when someone reposts it.
Invented history can acquire its own lore
A fake image of a current event may prompt viewers to check whether the event happened. An invented historical disaster can be harder to assess, particularly when it resembles something that could have occurred.
A Reddit user, u/Arctic_Chilean, posted AI-generated images and described them as showing “The 2001 Great Cascadia 9.1 Earthquake & Tsunami,” an event that did not happen. The images appeared in a subreddit devoted to Midjourney experiments, where their artificial origin was apparent from the setting. Outside that context, one Reddit user said they had wondered why they did not remember the event until seeing the subreddit.
The fiction drew on a real place and a real concern: the Cascadia subduction zone is near the Pacific Northwest, and a massive earthquake occurred there in 1700. That connection made the imagined scenes feel possible. Reddit users then began inventing explanations for how a supposed 2001 disaster might have affected global politics, including the War on Terror and the invasion of Iraq.
The process resembles the “Goncharov” meme: people build on a shared premise until it develops detailed lore. But images can make the starting fiction seem like a record of something that happened, rather than a story being made up together.
Recognizing synthetic images is getting harder
AI image generators still produce visible errors. The source describes distorted street signs and hands with three fingers as clues a viewer might notice by looking closely. Yet the images are becoming harder to distinguish from real scenes, and a repost may reach someone who has no reason to inspect it carefully.
That creates a gap between how quickly synthetic images can circulate and how quickly people can establish what they show. A false image can contribute to mistaken beliefs even when its creator meant it as a joke. In the source’s examples, the crucial context often sat in a tweet or subreddit rather than in the image itself.
Some forms of deepfake content have faced legal restrictions: the source says legislators in the U.K. and some U.S. states enacted bans on nonconsensual deepfake AI porn. But humorous images such as the Balenciaga Pope and fictional events such as the Great Cascadia earthquake are not inherently as harmful, and the source notes they are unlikely to face regulatory guardrails soon.
As synthetic images become more convincing, viewers may need to treat an image’s context as part of the evidence. A realistic-looking scene can be a starting point for a story, a parody or a deliberate experiment—not proof that the event it depicts took place.