According to Futurism, a fake AI-generated image of Hurricane Melissa went viral starting around 1am EST on October 28, showing birds circling safely above the hurricane’s eye. The image quickly spread across X, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Meta’s Threads, earning tens of thousands of reactions. Retired meteorologist Rich Grumm told Yale Climate Connections that based on the scale of Melissa’s 10-mile-wide eye, the birds in the image would be larger than football fields. Former Penn State meteorology professor Lee Grenci added that the birds would need to fly at altitudes above Mount Everest, where air density is too low for flight. Another viral AI image falsely showed a Jamaican hospital destroyed by the storm, though fact-checkers identified Google’s SynthID watermark. With dozens of accounts posting identical images, experts suspect coordinated bot farms helped spread the misinformation.
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The physics don’t work
Here’s the thing about that viral hurricane image – it’s not just fake, it’s physically impossible on multiple levels. The birds would need to be absolutely enormous, flying in conditions where no bird could survive. And they’d be doing it at altitudes where commercial planes struggle. It’s the kind of image that looks dramatic but falls apart with even basic critical thinking.
Meanwhile, real hurricane hunters were actually flying through Melissa and captured genuine footage of the storm. They had to turn back due to the extreme conditions – which tells you everything you need to know about whether birds could be casually circling in the eye. The contrast between what’s actually possible and what AI can generate is becoming dangerously wide.
This wasn’t accidental
When you see dozens of accounts posting the exact same image across multiple platforms, that’s not organic sharing. That’s coordinated activity, likely using AI content farms or bot networks. The speed at which this stuff spreads is alarming – it went from X to basically every major platform within hours.
What’s particularly concerning is how people are reacting. One user actually said this would be “in meteorology textbooks” – showing that even obvious fakes can convince people when they’re emotionally charged or visually striking. During a real crisis when people are scared and looking for information, this kind of content can do real damage.
Why this matters
Think about that fake hospital image for a second. If you’re in Jamaica trying to find medical help after a hurricane, and you see pictures suggesting your local hospital is destroyed, you might not go there. People could die because of these fakes. It’s not just harmless internet nonsense – it has real-world consequences.
Yale Climate Connections notes this isn’t the first time we’ve seen fake disaster imagery – Hurricane Sandy had similar issues back in 2012. But generative AI makes the problem exponentially worse because the fakes are more convincing and easier to produce at scale. Basically, we’ve supercharged an existing problem.
Where do we go from here?
The genie’s out of the bottle, as they say. Watermarking tools like Google’s SynthID help identify AI content, but they’re not perfect and most platforms don’t use them consistently. Fact-checking organizations like Full Fact are doing important work, but they’re playing whack-a-mole against an endless stream of AI-generated content.
So what’s the solution? Better detection tools, sure. Platform accountability, absolutely. But honestly, the most important defense might be teaching people to be more skeptical of what they see online. Because the next viral AI image might not be as obviously impossible as birds larger than football fields.
