AI-generated images misrepresented as historic Nebraska fires
- Published on March 23, 2026 at 19:08
- 3 min read
- By AFP USA
The US state of Nebraska experienced the largest wildfires in its history in March 2026. But fabricated images of the blazes quickly gained traction on social media, as firefighters were battling four major burning zones across the state.
"Nebraska is in the middle of a devastating wildfire emergency," reads a March 16, 2026 post, accompanied by what appears to be an aerial view of the blaze, shared thousands of times on X.
Ben Tapper, a Nebraska chiropractor who previously spread falsehoods about the Covid-19 vaccine, shared the image on Facebook, where it circulated via other accounts as well.
Unusually strong wildfires decimated nearly 800,000 acres over a week in Nebraska. Images of the blazes ravaging the prairie state spread rapidly on social media (archived here, here and here).
But the image in the screenshot above is fabricated.
With no reliable news source or authority sharing the image, AFP found a Facebook account named "Amazing World" posted its earliest iteration on March 16. The page, which self-describes as a "photographer," is riddled with content enhanced with artificial intelligence.
Several visual inaccuracies also confirm the image is a fake.
Suspicious elements
Chad Bladow, a prescribed fire program manager for The Nature Conservancy in Nebraska (archived here), said a key giveaway that the image is inauthentic is that asphalt roads would not typically be in flames (archived here).
He said in a March 19 email that the landscapes in the image also did not match the locations of any of the four major wildfires impacting Nebraska, further confirming its fabrication.
The fields in the image are small and square, while Bladow said the Morrill and Cottonwood areas -- the two major fire zones that remained active the longest in Nebraska -- use center pivot irrigation crop fields and "if the image was taken from either of those two wildfires we should see round fields" (archived here and here).
He also questioned the smoke color. "There should be more white smoke, but the image shows only dark smoke."
"The pattern of how the fire is burning in the images doesn't match a normal prairie wildfire," he added.
Other footage shared on Facebook -- including one post admitting to the use of artificial intelligence and displaying the logo of OpenAI's text-to-video tool Sora -- showcased further errors, such as the deployment of firefighting engines rather than the brush trucks designed to combat fast-moving grass fires (archived here).
"Also, firefighters don't jump from engines," the Nature Conservancy's Bladow said. "The real images are dramatic enough."
Heat, drought conditions
The scale of the fires, however, is very real, experts noted (archived here).
Kaitlyn Trudeau, a climate science senior research associate at Climate Central and the non-profit's Vice President for Science Kristina Dahl, jointly explained to AFP that current drought conditions and relatively high temperatures fueled the historic wildfires (archived here, here, here and here).
"These are exactly the kind of conditions which promote extreme fire behavior and make fires more erratic and harder to control," they said in a March 19 email.
Strong winds pushed the fires to cover over 800,000 acres -- an area larger than the state of Rhode Island -- in just a week, according to numbers released by the Nebraska Emergency Management Agency (archived here). The fires left at least one person dead and state authorities said the origins of the blazes remained undetermined.
AFP previously debunked fabricated images associated with extreme weather events and natural disasters.
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