Steve CrawfordI have gotten my first question on “are the Artemis II images real?” My first thought was: Yes they are real! If they were faked, the toilet wouldn’t have broken.
The Universe is this beautiful and we can do amazing things when we work together.
At the same time, I’ve seen plenty of AI images generated here on social media claiming to be real. With today’s technology, it would not be hard to fake it.
And this raises the important question about trust. While some experiments and research anyone can do, building your own telescope to track Orion is not trivial for anyone. We can’t all do our own research - we have to know who we can trust and we have to build organizations that are trustworthy.
Integrity is not only the name of the Orion spacecraft but also a core value at NASA. NASA has policies to label AI generated material and to be transparent with its data. Research integrity and transparency are critical to scientific discovery. From my experience, those working at NASA take this seriously.
So when you see images and if you aren’t sure, check who is sharing it, check the provenance of the images, and check the NASA repositories for the images to verify them.
And when verified, enjoy the images and dream about what other amazing things we can accomplish when we work together!