Is Mark Ruffalo a liar, or merely ignorant?
If there’s a third option after the actor, who played Bruce Banner / The Hulk in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, shared images on social media that had been debunked eight months previously as created by artificial intelligence, I can’t see what it might be.
Ruffalo shared the images in a post to X on Thursday, despite the fact that fact-checker Lead Stories debunked the very same images in an article on May 9, 2023.
Gross. #MAGA wants to paint everyone on those flights as pedophiles except the one guy who smiles in a group of young girls all headed to Epstein’s “Fantasy Island” with him. My bet is there are some decent republicans left in America that may think this is going too far. https://t.co/e0IWT1lnCZ
— Mark Ruffalo (@MarkRuffalo) January 5, 2024
“Gross,” he wrote in the post. “#MAGA wants to paint everyone on those flights as pedophiles except the one guy who smiles in a group of young girls all headed to Epstein’s ‘Fantasy Island’ with him.
“My bet is there are some decent republicans left in America that may think this is going too far,” he added.
My bet would have been that there were some decent actors in Hollywood capable of distinguishing between reality and fantasy. I think Ruffalo has a better chance of collecting on his bet than I do.
“Did old, never-before-seen photos surface in May of 2023 of Donald Trump posing with young women on a private jet, and also partying with Jeffrey Epstein?” Lead Stories asked in its May 9 article.
Should Mark Ruffalo apologize for sharing the fake photos?
“No, that’s not true,” the site answered itself. “Although there are authentic images of Donald Trump posing for pictures with young women and with Jeffrey Epstein, these three images surfaced on social media without any provenance or explanation of where they came from or what they show.
“The images show telltale signs of having been partly or entirely fabricated with an AI program such as Midjourney, leaving legs off Epstein in one case,” Sarah Thompson wrote for the site.
It would have been a relatively simple matter for Ruffalo to check out the provenance of the images in question with a simple Google search.
That, of course, would require him to look for information outside the far-left echo chamber, however, which is a stretch for many committed leftists. (To be fair, it’s a stretch for many on the right, as well.)
Luckily, X wasn’t fooled.
The Hulk is more real than these pictures…
— Kevin Dalton (@TheKevinDalton) January 5, 2024
You might play an intelligent person on screen, but reality says quite the opposite.
Tell me, what type of plane is that in the right picture with a single window that huge? Oh that’s right, it doesn’t exist. AI generated. Does it have a glass bottom also?
— Department Of Injustice (@DepartmentOfIn7) January 5, 2024
The fact that you spread this without realizing it has been debunked as fake AI generated is part of the problem. Hand / arm positions (arms long) neck long, eyes sharpened. Do some research before embarrassing yourself.
— 🇺🇸MagnificentBitch, PhD🐾 (@kpwisnotoncall) January 5, 2024
The only question really remaining is whether Ruffalo was so incredibly ignorant that he believed these images to be authentic, or he knew that they weren’t and shared them anyway.
Ignorant or liar? Anyone want to take that bet?
