A few months ago, a photograph of a metallic saucer-shaped object floating in the sky went viral after a Mexican national television outlet showed it on its news. In a network interview, a car mechanic told reporters crowded outside his house how and where he had seen the alleged object: “We were working out here in the shop when we saw some dark clouds, it was cloudy like now. I wanted to shoot a video but my phone was in photo mode and I only got one picture.”
Apparently after that he uploaded the image to Facebook and it went viral in a matter of minutes. Even some international media like The Sun or News.com.au. They echoed the story. However, most experts on the subject point out that the image was actually created through artificial intelligence.
In fact, according to UFO sighting buffs who discuss forums and post news on Reddit, fake photos of unidentified objects flying over cities at night are swarming more and more on the Internet since the Image-generating AIs like Midjourney or Dall-E.
Coincidence or not?
In one of the Facebook groups dedicated to Midjourney, the artificial intelligence that generates images from textual descriptions and which we have repeatedly talked about at Magnet, a user stated that had managed to generate the same photo of the UFO using the software. In his post, he put two screenshots, one of The Sun article and one of the bot generating the image from the prompt: “Highly defined UFO flying over a poor house in a Mexican city”.
Alongside the photo, she gloated with the following post: “So… Once again, one of my naughty random Facebook group posts got out of control… and now it’s in The Sun. People need to hire me to create fake news.
This caught the attention not only of Midjourney fans, who praised their favorite AI for creating images that could pass as “real”, but also of the sighting-loving community, who were quick to debunk the hypothesis that it had been created from of AI. The story made its way to the r/UFOs subReddit, where a user named eStuffeBay said, “This is NOT an AI-generated image. This is a blatant, poorly fabricated lie.” His reasoning was that Midjourney was not able to add renders to an existing image, meaning that the UFO was on a street confirmed to be real.
However, other Midjourney users explained that it is possible, since the AI can use images from Google Street View. The ufo youtuber ledrack analyzed the photos and proposed another theory: that the object in question it had a great resemblance to a type of toy magnet which, if launched into the air, could replicate the appearance of the UFO.
The truth is that most of the claims surrounding this story are difficult to verify independently without access to the metadata of the original images. In fact, at Magnet we have tried to recreate the same photograph entering the same description in Midjourney’s AI and this is what we have obtained:
However, in the Aliens subreddit, a space dedicated to lovers of this type of phenomenon, Several users have been denouncing that the Internet has been plagued by photos of UFOs that seem real created from Artificial Intelligence. “AI generated photos are fascinating, but can we stop now? We all have the same ability to generate a creepy photo of a UFO or aliens. Our forum voted to make it a rule not to post AI images. I’m just someone who frequents this submarine and it has been a joke for me to see images of UFOs and aliens and then discover that it was AI”.
Why are there now more images of unidentified objects than ever before? Why can no one explain the origin of these photographs? What trend does the phenomenon respond to? The explanation lies in two important factors that have now put UFOs on the lips of so many:
1) The Pentagon report
In June, the US Pentagon itself published a startling report on Unexplained Aerial Phenomena (UAP) which suggested that there were more than 140 cases of UAP that could not be explained. The report came just after military footage documenting strange occurrences in the sky was leaked, and after belated testimony from dozens of Navy pilots helped destigmatize an issue long branded as mere “conspiracy theories.” “.
“I am sure that 2022 will be a seismic year for UFOs,” explained Nick Pope, who spent years investigating UFOs for the British Ministry of Defense, in this Guardian article.
For decades, the pilots had refused to share their experiences, worried about being called “crazy.” However, a recent account by Navy pilots has now been given more credence by the leaked military footage showing an oval flying object near a US Navy ship off the coast of San Diego, and videos showing triangular-shaped objects in the sky.
2) The rise of image-generating AI
In recent years, these machine learning systems They have greatly increased their quality and precision. Sometimes it is even difficult to differentiate one of them from its real counterpart.. In fact, some industries already use them as book covers, in advertising, etc. Now we have seen how these tools are passing from the laboratories of companies to the users themselves. As we have seen in Xatakawe are in a boom of image-generating AIs such as I left, Make-A-Scene, DALL-E or Midday.
Thanks to its simplicity (you just have to write a prompt), these technologies trained with billions of images, are capable of creating images at will in a few seconds. And of course, most users seek originality above all else. We have seen who asks the bot to show them their own “vision” on topics such as the future, space, climate change or even how will be the last selfie of our planet. Why wouldn’t there be room for a flying saucer?
Images: AI (MidJourney) | Pentagon.