The Caribbean just suffered one of the largest Hurricanes in recorded history. The scale of Melissa — which bombarded Jamaica, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic with sustained winds of 185 mph — is unprecedented, which is makes it all the more bizarre to see fake AI-generated images of the storm go viral.
While sharing doctored images in the aftermath of a disaster is a decade-long tradition at this point, Yale’s Climate Connections blog notes that generative AI is now making crisis misinformation worse than it’s ever been.
One of the most flagrant pieces of disinfo surrounding Hurricane Melissa is an AI generated picture purporting to show the system from miles above the ground. The image shows an absolutely mammoth hurricane eye, punctuated by a flock of birds circling safely above.
Yet as retired meteorologist and National Weather Service science and operations office Rich Grumm told Yale’s CC, the scale of the image simply doesn’t work — Melissa’s eye was reported to be around 10 miles wide.
“Based on the scale of the eye, these birds would be larger than football fields,” Grumm told CC.
And as former meteorology professor at Penn State University, Lee Grenci told the blog, “these birds would have to have been flying at altitudes well above the summit of Mount Everest” for this image to be real.
“The air temperature and air density are way too low for birds to fly,” Grenci commented. Sure enough, as the fake image was going viral, a daring crew of hurricane hunters demonstrated the physical limits of weather observation flights when they punched through the storm wall and into Melissa’s eye, capturing some jaw dropping footage of the monster system.
As far as the fake image goes, it seems to have kicked off on X-formerly-Twitter at around 1am EST on October 28, but soon began making the rounds all over Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Meta’s Threads, earning tens of thousands of reactions. With dozens of various accounts posting the exact same image, it’s likely the post spread with the help of a coordinated bot farm.
“I’ve never seen the ‘stadium effect’ so pronounced and well-defined,” one poster said on X, uploading the AI image alongside a real one. “This will be in meteorology textbooks.”
Yale’s CC notes this isn’t the only piece of AI-misinformation surrounding Hurricane Melissa. Another bit of viral slop appeared to show a Jamaican hospital completely decimated by the storm, though fact checkers quickly identified a SynthID stamp, an invisible watermark embedded into content made with Google’s AI tools.
Still, it’s impossible to tell the harm it might have caused — it’s not hard to imagine scenarios where those seeking help may have been convinced an otherwise still-functioning hospital is completely destroyed.
It’s yet another example of the dangerous rise in AI-generated misinformation, and a reminder that this is one genie we won’t be putting back into the bottle anytime soon.
More on AI: Slop Farmer Boasts About How He Uses AI to Flood Social Media With Garbage to Trick Older Women