SOCIAL MEDIA HAS recently been awash with an image purportedly from the sitcom The Simpsons alongside claims that the show predicted the collapse of a bridge in Baltimore last month
The claim has spread online after a cargo ship struck into the Francis Scott Key Bridge bridge on 26 March, causing it to collapse.
Authorities are still investigating the incident which occurred after the ship lost power.
Since then, an image has been spread online that appears to show characters Homer and Lisa Simpson on a boat watching as a cargo vessel tears through a steel bridge, similar to the one in Baltimore.
Claims accompanying the image, which suggest the show predicted the bridge collapse, have been spread across various social media sites, most notably Facebook, where it has been shared more than 90,000 times.
“I guess we just need to start watching the Simpsons to find out what’s gonna happen,” a number of identical posts featuring the image say. “Of course they predicted the bridge collapse.”
The bridge collapse is the latest in a long line of events that people have claimed were foreshadowed in episodes of The Simpsons.
Notably, an episode based in the future where Lisa Simpson becomes president features the line “as you know, we’ve inherited quite a budget crunch from President Trump”. The episode was first aired in March 2000 – 16 years before Trump became president.
Other predictions are more spurious, such as those which claim that The Simpsons predicted outbreaks of the Ebola virus.
However, the image that was shared does not appear to be from The Simpsons – instead, it is likely to have been generated by an artificial intelligence.
Reverse image searches do not reveal any copies of the image prior to the bridge collapse, and some unusual features in the image indicate that it is not an official drawing.
Most notably, in the image Homer’s iconic two hairs are joined by a third.
An unnecessary line between Homer’s cheek and nose is also depicted though it does not appear in previous depictions of the character from the same angle
Lisa, who is only seen from the background also is shown with additional and uneven hair spikes; Lisa’s style guide specifically notes she should have eight spikes, not the ten shown.
A third character is shown without pupils.
Some of the boats shown in the water do not make any sense, including one that appears to be a piece of pier floating by itself.
And the crashed cargo ship itself has features that blend into each other, such as a smokestack that becomes a flagpole.
In the case of The Simpsons, the most famous tell-tale sign of AI-generated images, an usual number of fingers, was not applicable.
“Sadly #TheSimpsons “predictions” are now meaningless,” Matt Selman, a showrunner and executive producer for The Simpsons who has been writing for the show since 1997, wrote on X/Twitter.
“People so desperately want to believe in the show’s ‘magic powers’ (or are just very lazy) that they ignore that obviously fake images of the so-called predictions cannot be traced to any actual episode — like this nonsense” he said, including the image of the cargo ship hitting the bridge.
“Homer,” he later wrote about the image, “famous for his love of coffee.”
The Journal’s FactCheck is a signatory to the International Fact-Checking Network’s Code of Principles. You can read it here. For information on how FactCheck works, what the verdicts mean, and how you can take part, check out our Reader’s Guide here. You can read about the team of editors and reporters who work on the factchecks here.
To embed this post, copy the code below on your site
have your say