A set of viral images confronted social media users with a weird scenario involving Elon Musk. The photos weren’t as they seemed.
Elon Musk continued his unrelenting embrace of the future as images circulated online of the billionaire supposedly kissing robot women.
Internet users were left baffled this week when images of Musk — who has built a career in future-facing technologies including electric cars, space exploration and social media — kissing female humanoids went viral.
The four images, posted by Twitter user Daniel Marven, showed
Musk embracing four different robot women, who had metallic bodies and
female faces — but all was not as it seemed.
“Elon Musk
announces the future wife,” Marven wrote.
“Who is she? It is the
first robot that has been manufactured specifically designed with artificial
intelligence, with the personality and the characteristics of the female
that he dreams of … which is not found in any normal person, because of
course, there is no normal person that has all the required
specifications.”
The images were created using AI.
“The post is to clarify the dangers of AI (artificial intelligence)
in the coming period, especially after Tesla Company released the first
integrated robot ‘Optimus’,” Marven wrote in the same tweet.
The
AI-generated images came just days after Tesla unveiled footage of its
actual humanoid robots, known as Optimus, taking their first steps.
The clip was released at Tesla’s shareholders meeting last week
and showed five Optimus robots performing tasks such as walking through an
empty office, mirroring human movements and gently handling an egg.
The Optimus robots are designed to complete “dangerous, menial or
boring tasks”, Musk has previously said.
Twitter users poked fun
at the AI-generated make-out images, which they said were not a far cry from
Musk’s actual vision of the future.
“The Black Mirror trailer
just dropped,” one user wrote, referencing the sci-fi drama that explores
disturbing potential implications of a hi-tech future.
“This post does clarify one of the dangers of AI. It is being
used to generate images like these to fool people into thinking they are
real,” commented another.
