Meta has a suggestion for people like me who forgot to go out and look at the Northern Lights on Thursday night: just use ai to pretend! But Threads users who responded to Meta's idea, posted alongside three ai-generated images of the Meta Aurora Borealis last night, seem to disagree.
The images show the northern lights floating over the Golden Gate Bridge, over a city skyline and over a Ferris wheel. It's clearly intended to take advantage of a trending moment in which people are posting their own photographs of the Northern Lights from the incredible and rare light display, which sank deep. to the united states on Thursday night.
Once you get past the early comments from people sharing their own ai-generated Northern Lights images, the responses range from reflexively critical:
One person who claims to be an “astronaut/particle physicist and artificial intelligence scientist” received particularly detailed comments:
Others shared photographs they say they took of the phenomenon:
Like the Olympics ad that Google pulled, Meta's social media team couldn't read the room. User posts don't just show a pretty picture (although that's certainly part of it!). It is also about participating in a collective celebration of a rare and shared lived experience. This is not the time or place to insert an ai-generated image.
Society is still sorting out confusing questions about ai, such as what it's doing to photography and the ethics of training it on the collected works of artists, writers, musicians and photographers on the Internet. Until the dust settles from such debates, posts like Meta's will continue to miss the mark.
