ByJohn Brandon,
Senior Contributor.
As we enter the final month of the year, the biggest news in tech might just be something that’s confusing to users and making us wonder if AI is getting out of hand. Over Thanksgiving, images of tech moguls like Elon Musk gathering with other tech billionaires surfaced on social media. The culprit? Google Gemini’s Nano Banana Pro AI image generation tool, which can now create fake images that look hyper-realistic and hard to distinguish from the real thing.
I’ve been tracking this issue over the last few weeks, covering how the AI actress Tilly Norwood caused a stir on social media because it was not immediately obvious she was a digital creation. A top Billboard hit by a non-human artist called Breaking Rust (which some users renamed Breaking Wind) turned out to be AI-generated.
Most importantly, social media users keep posting about how they are not happy about how widespread these images are and how it’s getting almost impossible to know they are AI-generated. The most recent example shows Elon Musk dining with Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google and Alphabet, and several others.
