From Balenciaga Pope to the Great Cascadia Earthquake, AI images are creating a new reality

Last fall, Tumblr users raved about Martin Scorsese’s 1973 film “Goncharov,” starring Robert De Niro and Al Pacino. They hailed the lesser-known Scorsese classic as the greatest mafia movie ever made. It was ahead of its time, never earning the acclaim it deserved. By now, we should all know that “Goncharov” is not a real film, even though Scorsese himself got in on the joke. It’s just a Tumblr meme that spiraled into a site-wide gag, as users toiled away in shared Google Docs, collaboratively working together to “yes, and” one another with such sincerity and precision that the made-up movie could seem legit. As AI image generation gets better, the internet feels a bit like Tumblr in the moment of “Goncharov.” We are creating new collective realities, only this time, we are accidentally generating them simply by posting without much thought. When AI image generator Midjourney opened access to the Midjourney 5 model two weeks ago, its hyper-realistic outputs quickly went viral. Some of the resulting images illustrated the dangers of these easily accessible tools, like a series of fake photos depicting Donald Trump’s arrest. The dramatic set of images shows Trump forcibly resisting arrest, then sprinting away from
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