The viral Simpson’s illustration of Diddy running away from the police in his pink suit is AI-generated and was not a part of the American sitcom.
While you might be gasping at the accuracy with which ‘The Simpsons’ had yet again made a future prediction that came true, the viral picture of Diddy running away from the police is AI generated, as Simpsons showrunner Matt Selman explains to TMZ.
Debunking the picture, Selman says, “In the current era of digital misinformation, The Simpsons ‘predictions’ (or, more accurately, ‘coincidences’) have become meaningless. Any goofball can whip up an AI image based on a current event and say ‘The Simpsons predicted it!’ — and decent-but-easily-misled folks will believe it because they so very want it to be true.”
Diddy Combs is an American rapper who has been currently boiling under several civil lawsuits related to s*xual assault and other heinous misdeeds.
The image was first shared on Facebook by DJ Skandalous, an artist, producer, and DJ also known as Kevin Rivera. Rivera revealed to USA TODAY that he had made the picture using AI, and uses the tool to fabricate his posts on social media as well.
He shared that he created the picture out of a joke and never expected it to be shared all over the internet. Ever since the revelation, Rivera has updated the post and inserted the disclaimer, ‘*AI Imagery*’ for information purposes. Rivera, although conscious of the dangers AI could pose in the future, holds the opinion that demonizing the tool is not the solution. It is wiser to create safe detectable methods around its usage that could help avoid issues.
Additionally, James O’Brien, professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley spoke to USA TODAY about clues he detected in the picture to know it was fake. He said, “The background officer to the far left has his mustache going in front of a person several feet away from him,” before adding another detail, “The officer to the far right is not chasing Diddy, rather he seems to be running alongside him. And the image resolution is better than nearly all the available fame captures from the Simpsons.”
While addressing the AI-generated picture, the Simpson’s showrunner gave credit to the show for making surprisingly accurate predictions in the past. For instance, events such as the Ebola outbreak, the “Game of Thrones” series finale, the Titanic submersible disaster, the Siegfried and Roy tiger attack, Lady Gaga’s Super Bowl halftime show, and Donald Trump’s presidency were all foreshadowed by the show.
Selman clarified to TMZ that the accuracy of predictions heavily depended on history and math. He opined as a matter of fact, “If you study history, you will be able to ‘predict’ the future because the foolishness of humanity repeats itself. If you study math, you will know that if the show makes literally tens of thousands of jokes about American society over almost 800 episodes, it would be statistically impossible not to create material that overlaps with what would later happen in real life.”
This opinion was seconded by Former showrunner Bill Oakley in a 2020 interview with Reuters. He said, “I would say in general when people say ‘The Simpsons’ has predicted something, it is just that we were satirizing real-life events from years before, and because history keeps repeating, it just seems like we were predicting things.”