From smoking at McDonald’s to AI Tom Cruise, 2024 was a busy year for viral hoaxes.
The internet is absolutely flooded with fake images, whether they’re fake photos, fake videos or fake animated GIFs. There are so many fakes spreading online these days that it can be hard to keep track. We’ve got a round-up of the fakes that went viral this year and it hopefully serves as a helpful reminder that you shouldn’t always believe your own lying eyes.
Here at Gizmodo, we’ve been fact-checking fake images that go viral for well over a decade now. And while most of those images of the past were altered with clunky Photoshop-like tools, generative AI is now fueling viral hoaxes.
But that doesn’t mean everything in 2024 was AI-generated. In fact, the images that actually tricked people in 2024 were often more traditional photoshop-style fakes. AI is abundant, but people have …