Last autumn, Tumblr users praised Martin Scorsese's 1973 film Goncharov, starring Robert De Niro and Al Pacino. They praised this little-known Scorsese classic as the greatest mafia film of all time. It is ahead of its time, but has never won the praise it deserves.

Now, we should all know that "Goncharov" is not a real movie, even though Scorsese himself was involved in this joke. This is just a meme on Tumblr, which later evolved into a parody of the entire website. Users collaborate with each other in shared Google documents, sincerely and accurately answering "yes, and", to the extent that this fictional movie seems reasonable.

With the improvement of artificial intelligence image generation technology, the internet feels a bit like the Tumblr of Goncharov's moment. We are creating new collective realities, but this time, we have accidentally created them by releasing information without thinking.

Two weeks ago, when the artificial intelligence image generator Midjournal opened access to the Midjournal 5 model, its surreal output quickly became popular. Some generated images illustrate the danger of these easily accessible tools, such as a series of fake photos depicting Donald Trump's arrest.

This set of dramatic images shows Trump forcibly resisting arrest and then sprinting past a team of police officers. These wildfire like images circulating on the internet were created by Eliot Higgins, founder of the investigative news website Bellingcat. Higgins initially tweeted that he was just playing, but these tweets quickly spread without any relevant background.

Note: Currently, the tweet has added background information, stating that the photo was generated by artificial intelligence.

Other widely circulated artificial intelligence images are milder, such as a high-end fashion photo of Pope Francis II wearing a stunning Balenciaga white coat. A tweet about this photo has been viewed over 26 million times.

This is not even the only AI meme virus related to the Balenciaga family last week. A creator named demonflyingfox has been using Midjournal images, Eleven Labs voice, and D-ID animations to create surreal, AI driven quirky videos. His most widely circulated video is "Harry Potter by Balenciaga", which is a high-end fashion style advertisement in which the synthesized character image says things like "You are Balenciaga, Harry".