Have you seen the photo of a dog trying to make sweet and passionate love to a robot dog? It’s gone viral on websites Reddit, InstagramAnd X. But it’s a fake. A hopeless, tragic fake.
The original photo was first shared on Facebook by the New York Fire Department a long time ago April 18, 2023. And as you can see from the comparison created below, there is no white dog riding into town on the fire department’s robot dog.
It’s not entirely clear who first created the photoshopped image, but it appears on the Firefighting on subreddit April 19, 2023, just a day after the original was posted on Facebook. Other accounts on various platforms also posted the manipulated photo on April 19, 2023, including this account on Instagrammaking it difficult to narrow down who actually came up with the joke.
The original photo gained attention because the New York City Fire Department created a robotics unit in 2022, which can be used for search and rescue operations. The robot was used during a that day Partial building collapse of a parking garage in Lower Manhattan.
“The robot dog or the drones, they can stream the video directly to our phones, directly to our command center,” New York City Fire Department Chief John Esposito told reporters shortly after the incident last year in a video broadcast by CBS New York.
“This is the first time we’ve been able to fly in to a collapse to do this and try to get 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 it answers the question on our minds after seeing an admittedly photoshopped image of a dog trying to mount a robot dog : Would that ever happen in reality? Life? Dogs have been known to attempt to hump almost anything, but we are not aware of any documented cases. But this may simply be explained by the fact that these four-legged robots are not yet very common.
Have you seen a robot trying to get really close to a robot dog? Write us a message or leave your story in the comments. Without photographic evidence, we probably won’t believe you. And given the ubiquity of artificial intelligence tools that make creating such images easier than ever, we probably still won’t believe you.
Oh, the dangers of living in the future. Photo evidence isn’t worth much these days. But a funny changed picture is still a funny changed picture, regardless What era do you live in?.