Perhaps you’ve come across a stunning bird’s-eye view of «Hollywood Mountain» in California on Facebook or BlueSky? It turns out that it was completely generated by artificial intelligence — in fact, there is no place with that name.
As noted by GizmodoThe image was originally posted on Facebook by a user named Mimi Echis Ojo — and for those who have never been to the United States, it could seem quite real. At the same time, Ojo’s page contains many other AI-generated images, which could have already led to questions about the authenticity of the photo.
Writer Cooper Lund wrote on BlueSky that such confusion could be a big disappointment for tourists who travel to the United States in search of fantastic scenes actually created by artificial intelligence. He mentioned that something very similar happened in the early 2010s when Chinese tourists visited Paris. They expected the city to look «like a movie set for a romantic love story» and instead saw «cigarette butts, rude locals, and gratuitous public displays of affection».
Interestingly, psychologists are already talking about the so-called «Paris syndrome» — a condition in which foreigners suffer from depression, anxiety, feelings of persecution, and even hallucinations when their rosy images do not correspond to reality.