Author: Arryn Robbins, Assistant Professor of Psychology, University of Richmond

I’m more of a scroller than a poster on social media. Like many people, I wind down at the end of the day with a scroll binge, taking in videos of Italian grandmothers making pasta or baby pygmy hippos frolicking. For a while, my feed was filled with immaculately designed tiny homes, fueling my desire for minimalist paradise. Then, I started seeing AI-generated images; many contained obvious errors such as staircases to nowhere or sinks within sinks. Yet, commenters rarely pointed them out, instead admiring the aesthetic. These images were clearly AI-generated and didn’t depict reality. Did people just not…