Have you seen that photo of a dog attempting to make sweet and passionate love to a robot dog? It’s gone viral on sites like Reddit, Instagram, and X. But it’s fake. Hopelessly, tragically fake.
The original photo was first shared by the New York Fire Department on Facebook way back on April 18, 2023. And, as you can see from the side-by-side we’ve created below, there’s no white dog going to town on the fire department’s robotic canine.
It’s not entirely clear who first made the photoshopped image, but it shows up on the subreddit Firefighting on April 19, 2023, just a day after the original was posted to Facebook. Other accounts on a variety of platforms also posted the manipulated photo on April 19, 2023, including this account on Instagram, making it difficult to narrow down who actually created the joke.
The original photo gained attention because the New York Fire Department has a robotics unit, founded in 2022, that can be deployed for search and rescue operations. The robot was being used that day during a partial building collapse of a parking garage in Lower Manhattan.
“The robot dog or the drones, they’re able to stream the video directly to our phones, directly to our command center,” New York’s chief of fire operations John Esposito told reporters shortly after it happened last year in a video aired by CBS New York.
“This is the first time that we’ve been able to fly inside in a collapse to do this and try to get us some information, again, without risking the lives of our firefighters,” Esposito continued.
While it’s great to see life-saving technology being used in such cool ways, none of this answers the question we’re not stuck with after seeing an admittedly photoshopped image of a dog trying to mount a robot dog: Would this ever happen in real life? Dogs will famously try to hump just about anything, but there haven’t been any documented cases that we’re aware of. But that may simply be explained by the fact that these four-legged robots aren’t very common yet.
Have you seen a robot trying to get up close and personal with a robot dog? Drop us a line or leave your story in the comments. We’re probably not going to believe you without photographic evidence. And given the ubiquity of artificial intelligence tools that make such images easier to create than ever, we still probably won’t believe you.
Oh, the perils of living in the future. Photographic evidence isn’t worth very much these days. But a funny altered image is still a funny altered image, no matter what era you live in.
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