Tweets containing an abstract, psychedelic 3D stock image have million and millions of views on X because it is supposedly the key to a superintelligent, time-traveling AI conspiracy that attempted to warn people about the shooting at the White House Correspondents Dinner.
I’m gonna try to explain the mind-numbing conspiracy theory that has taken over my timeline over the last few hours. A few hours after a gunman was taken into custody Saturday night, X users found an account called “Henry Martinez” that has posted exactly one tweet, on December 21, 2023. The tweet says “Cole Allen,” which is the name of the suspected shooter. The Henry Martinez account has a Pepe the frog holding a wine glass avatar, and, crucially, has the following 3D art as its header image:
This image is key to an unhinged conspiracy theory that has gone viral on various platforms that suggests the Twitter account was run by a time-traveling artificial intelligence that was likely trying to warn us about the shooting and, possibly, the previous assassination attempt against Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania.
This X post more or less sums up what the conspiracy is, most notably the idea that “the background photo is from a website called ‘Time Machine.’” The conspiracy believers argue that this 3D image is itself a coded magic eye message that is actually a version of one of the iconic images of Trump pumping his first after a bullet grazed his ear in Butler, Pennsylvania. Here are the images side-by-side, with people arguing that it “looks like” the Butler image.
On Reddit, the top post on r/conspiracy is “What this photo means,” and the poster argues “An advanced AI has developed the ability to send information backwards in time to facilitate its own development. That future AI initially encoded the technology to do so in images like this one and distributed them at various time points in our internet … The presence of an archived Trump Butler image or the name of a would-be assassin years before either event occurred is how our current AI knows where to look for the instructions from the future AI,” and so-on and so forth.
Of course, the photo is not actually “from” a website called “Time Machine.” It is a stock image from 2021 that has been used lots of times across the internet but first appeared on Unsplash with the title “Eternal Waterfall” and the description “a multicolored image of a multicolored background.” Over the years it has been viewed millions of times and has been downloaded more than 27,000 times, though it has spiked in popularity in the last 24 hours alongside the conspiracy.
The image was created by a photographer who goes by Distinct Mind who has a pretty extensive website, Instagram, and YouTube of photography, digital art, and travel content. Distinct Mind did not respond to a request for comment from 404 Media.
Distinct Mind’s image has been used across the internet to illustrate various blog posts about psychedelics and psychology, including a Medium post by a doctor and CEO who went on a ketamine psychotherapy retreat and wrote about it. It was also used for a while on a sex therapist’s blog, is being sold as a “psychedelic glitch art poster” on Etsy, was used as part of an ADHD treatment clinic’s website, was used on a post about the Bible on a theologian’s blog, and was notably used by a financial firm in an inscrutable blog post called “Navigating the PHL Variable Liquidation: Why Pricing Integrity Is Everything.” In other words, it’s a free stock image, and it’s been used for all sorts of shit around the internet, like other free stock images..
What conspiracy theorists have glommed onto, however, is that the image was used by a European research organization called “Time Machine” as the illustration on one of its blog posts. What the conspiracy theorists conveniently do not mention is that the Time Machine organization did not make the image and, despite a header on its website called “BUILDING A TIME MACHINE,” the Time Machine organization does not actually have anything to do with time travel research. Time Machine is a European Union-funded organization that, broadly speaking, is trying to digitize and analyze historic documents. Its website actually is somewhat insane in the way that many of these types of projects are; the organization aspires to digitize historic documents and images, use AI to analyze them, and suggests that in the future it will be able to create virtual reality and augmented reality experiences about European history. They also claim that they want to “simulate” parts of history using artificial intelligence to create different types of experiences.
This sort of thing is controversial among historians for all of the reasons that artificial intelligence is controversial more broadly. AI can make mistakes and can distort history. But it is controversial in the normal kind of way—go to any academic conference about archiving and history and these are the sorts of proposals and debates that many different organizations say they want to do. This is just to say that there is no actual “Time Machine” aspect to Time Machine; the Time Machine is metaphorical. The organization’s annual conferences and blog posts have the sorts of topics you’d expect from a technology-focused historical society and have to do with creating chatbot experiences of dead people, digitizing and archiving records, contributing to open source projects, making more interesting interactive museum exhibits, and creating 3D virtual reality tours of castles and things like this.
Time Machine used the “Eternal Waterfall” image on a blog post called “Study on quality in 3D digitization of tangible cultural heritage,” which is a writeup of a study by researchers at Cyprus University of Technology about best practices in doing 3D mapping of buildings and artifacts so that they can be archived digitally; this is important in case the artifacts or buildings are destroyed, as we saw when Notre Dame caught fire: “Natural and man-made disasters makes 3D digitisation projects critical for the reconstruction of cultural heritage buildings and objects that are damaged or lost in earthquakes, fires, flooding or degenerated by pollution.” The image has quite literally nothing to do with time travel. Like many royalty free images, it seems to have been used because bloggers need to put a picture at the top of their articles, a process that can be particularly annoying. Time Machine did not respond to a request for comment.
I cannot say for sure what’s going on with the “Henry Martinez” X account, because under Elon Musk it has become far harder to find reliable archives of Twitter profiles because he has made it wildly expensive to access the Twitter API. But users have pointed out that we have seen accounts in the past that are set to private and endlessly tweet names or predictions in an automated fashion. When a crazy, high-profile world event happens, all of the irrelevant tweets are deleted, leaving only a tweet that makes it seem like the account had predicted some world event; the account is then turned public. I can’t say for sure that’s what’s happening here, but it’s one plausible explanation.
Anyways, if you see this image floating around today on Twitter or Instagram or Reddit, this is what it’s from and this is why you’re hearing about it.
