An image (here, here and here) allegedly from ‘The Simpsons’ is making rounds on social media, claiming that the popular sitcom predicted the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore on 26 March 2024. The alleged prediction is attributed to an episode from season 35 of the show. We will fact-check this claim through this article.
Claim: ‘The Simpsons’ predicted the collapse of the Baltimore bridge.
Fact: ‘The Simpsons’ did not predict the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse. The viral image is AI-generated and not from any episode of the series. Therefore, the claim made in the post is rated False.
To verify the authenticity of the claim, we examined the eighth episode of season 35 of ‘The Simpsons’ on Disney+Hotstar. The Simpsons family trip to Scotland is the storyline of this episode. There isn’t any scene suggesting or portraying the collapse of the Baltimore bridge.
Furthermore, we ran the viral image through Hive, an AI content detection tool. The tool identified the image as being likely generated by AI rather than an actual screengrab from a Simpsons episode.
Additionally, a closer inspection of the characters in the image revealed inconsistencies. Lisa Simpson’s hairstyle varies from her standard eight-spike hair pattern in the show to a ten-spike hair pattern in the viral image.
When the image started attracting attention on social media, Twitter added a community note tag to posts (here and here) containing the image, crediting it as AI-generated.
Matt Selman, Showrunner of ‘The Simpsons’, further dispelled the claims (archived post), calling the image fake and unrelated to any episode of the show.
To sum up, the image claiming to be from an episode of ‘The Simpsons’ supposedly predicting the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore is AI-generated.
