Believed to have been the largest fish to ever exist, megalodons could weigh up to 120,000 pounds, according to scientists.
In 2024, internet users shared an image allegedly showing a crowd posing with a captured megalodon, a type of prehistoric shark believed to have gone extinct around 3.6 million years ago. According to the posts, the image was an authentic black-and-white pH๏τo from the early 1900s.
Posts featuring the image appeared on social media platforms including X (archived), Instagram (archived), and Facebook (archived). One Facebook post (archived) that included the image had received around 12,000 likes and 2,700 comments at the time of this writing. Text included in the post read in part:
The Megalodon is alive!
At the beginning of the 20th century, German fishermen aboard the ship Seesturm made an extraordinary discovery in the North Sea: a live Megalodon shark, a creature believed to have been extinct for millions of years. As the mᴀssive shadow loomed over their boat, the fishermen faced a tremendous challenge.
However, the image was a piece of AI art, not an authentic pH๏τo of a megalodon.
A Google reverse image search showed that the earliest securely datable online instance of the image was a Jan. 24, 2024, post (archived) by Fantasy Creatures, an Instagram account that posts art explicitly labeled as AI-generated. The account’s bio read: “Imagining new worlds: AI-crafted fantasy creatures unleashed.”
The post itself also included numerous hashtags indicating that the image of fishermen posing with a megalodon was a piece of AI art. These hashtags included #aiartwork, #aiart, and #generativeart, as well as the names of various generative AI programs including Midjourney, DALL-E 3, and Stable Diffusion. It was not immediately clear what program created the image of the megalodon.
