There Really Was a Dinosaur in Minneapolis

Since everyone is sharing April Fools’ Day jokes on social media, many including AI-generated images, it reminded me that we’ve hit a believability inflection point. AI image generation is so good we don’t believe real things anymore.

The ICE operation in Minneapolis earlier this year brought a lot of social media commentary. I’m sure you remember seeing it. My goal with this blog is not to issue “hot takes,” but I still want to address how generative AI is impacting our everyday lives, and the thing I specifically remember is multiple different Facebook comments (from different political perspectives) attempting to discredit original photos from Minneapolis commenting that the photos were obviously AI fakes because there was a dinosaur on a car in the background.

Except they weren’t fake. Someone near the location just happened to be an apparent fan of Jurassic Park and had a statue of a dinosaur on a car. This statue was located near one of the ICE-related shootings in Minneapolis; hence, it was in a number of photos posted online. Because people have rightly become so concerned about falling for deepfake images, they cried “AI.” I won’t share information about the house, but I can confirm from corroborating publicly available information. It wasn’t AI. There really was a dinosaur (statue) in Minneapolis in the background of those real photos.

Joking is Fun, But Diminishing Returns on Building Awareness​

I used to occasionally mess with my family with joke AI images to remind them that AI image generation was advancing and that they shouldn’t trust everything they see on social media. But once Nano Banana, Google’s image generation and editing model in Gemini, was released, this came to its logical conclusion. AI images can look super realistic. There isn’t really anything more to say and the images being shared today show it.

I don’t begrudge anyone their jokes. But for me personally there isn’t much point in doing this “for awareness” anymore, so I don’t do it. Instead, later this month, I’ll go into what options exist for AI detection and output watermarking, as well as the false promises and challenges that come from AI detection.