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The world’s first trillionaire just celebrated his 55th birthday.
And we can’t tell which possibility is more depressing: that his mother used AI to either generate or enhance pictures of him blowing out the candles on a rocket cake made to look like a SpaceX Starship — or that his social media network is convinced it was actually him that posted the slop under his mom’s name.
“Happy birthday to my wonderful son,” the X account of Musk’s mother, Maye Musk, tweeted on Sunday. “Elon Musk has given me 55 years of joy.”
“It’s so much fun to celebrate with family and friends,” the account added curtly, not beating the allegations that a bot had penned the tweet. “His cake is a rocket and a Moon base.”
One of the two pictures shows Musk blowing out candles affixed to the end of a Starship cake, presumably to stand in for burners. The second shows an array of Lego blocks arranged to make it look like an off-planet colony.
As netizens were quick to point out, a hard-to-miss “Made With AI” tag was affixed to the post — before mysteriously being removed — undermining the pictures’ validity, and bumming everybody out even more.
However, we can’t rule out that Musk’s mother used AI to edit the pictures in post instead of generating them from scratch. While there aren’t any obvious signs of the pictures being faked in their entirety — though there’s a hyperreal sheen on the candles photo, and some of the Legos do look a bit garbled — users were left unconvinced.
“I would never understand why making moments like this with AI?” one user replied.
“You made your son’s birthday picture with AI?” another added.
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