Earlier this month, a bizarre image of Elon Musk, the CEO of Twitter, Tesla and SpaceX, went viral. The images showed Musk standing near what appeared to be a humanoid robot and kissing him. The image went viral on social media and was reposted thousands of times. They were also converted into videos and posted as reels, TikTok, shorts and YouTube videos. However, it turned out that these images were not real and were generated using artificial intelligence. Yes, this was another instance of fake news or image morphing in his AI.
The original source of the image is difficult to find, but one of the earliest sightings was Daniel Marven’s Twitter account. tweeted These images were accompanied by lengthy captions beginning with “Elon Musk announces future wife, who is she?”
A number of fact-checking websites have since emerged, highlighting that these were likely not real images, but were created using AI. Some of the obvious imperfections in the image, such as too many fingers on the hand and a distorted arm, are evidence that the image was created using AI.
Elon Musk viral image is fake
The appearance of this image coincides with Elon Musk announcing the Tesla Optimus robot, which is AI-powered and can be brought into the workforce. Tesla’s move to unveil a humanoid AI robot has met with some criticism as the rise of AI and its potential risks to job losses, deepfakes and biased decision-making are debated.
It is worth noting that a new statement on the risks of AI was recently released, co-signed by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and the father of AI, Jeffrey Hinton.
While the risks of AI cover larger issues about humanity, topics like deep fakes and morphed images also often affect real life and cannot be ignored. A few weeks ago, an AI-generated image of a fire in front of the Pentagon sent the US stock market crashing. Earlier, an AI-generated image of the Pope wearing a bomber jacket also went viral.
