We never post viral content, but because of our focus on nukes this one caught our attention. This photo popped up in one of our social media feeds yesterday, forwarded by a friend, and purports to show a 5:30 a.m. July 17, 1955 nuclear test that was part of Operation Teapot, observed at a distance of sixty-five miles by swimmers at the Desert Inn in Las Vegas. This obviously fake AI image managed to trick numerous people, who, when the deception was pointed out to them, resorted to pitched battle to avoid admitting the truth. Depending on which major social media platform you’re talking about, up to thirty-five percent of users can be under age twenty-four, but that still leaves a lot of adults that should know better. The comments in our feed were a sort of nuclear microcosm of what’s happening everywhere all at once these days, which is people losing not only science literacy, but their damn minds.
We probably have to tell none of you this, but for the record let’s go through it: debris clouds from nuclear explosions aren’t perfectly symmetrical; people don’t swim en masse at 5:30 a.m. even in Vegas; the sun rose at 5:38 that day, so the sky would still be mostly dark; the date is wrong because Operation Teapot ran from February to May, so no tests occurred in July; at sixty-five miles observers would see a flash and possibly a far-off dust cloud, not a massive soufflé; the relative distance of this AI blast from the hotel, at the scale depicted, would do serious harm to these unprotected vacationers and possibly blow out windows all over north Las Vegas; and the majority of people aren’t even looking in the direction of the explosion, which you’d think would command all of their attention. Generative AI is like a bad liar that people believe anyway. We’re in trouble, folks.
