One of the most popular conspiracy theories about the Los Angeles fires is that it’s all part of a plan to transform the Californian megalopolis into a super-tech modern capital. The theory suggests this transformation would involve wiping out the lavish mansions so mourned by certain media outlets, along with the other homes and cottages we nostalgically associate with films and TV series from the past—with their carpeted interiors and picket-fenced gardens that look like something straight out of Disney comics.
But technology undoubtedly plays a role in this devastating event. We use Google Maps to view the extent of the blaze, while the flow of information and solidarity spreads entirely through social media. It might sound paradoxical that in Silicon Valley’s home state—one of the wealthiest (still the wealthiest?) in the United States—the image symbolizing the fight against fire is a man holding a garden hose, as if watering the flames rather than battling them. Meanwhile, Instagram has been showing us for months images of drone swarms in China fighting fires in a way befitting a 21st-century global superpower. It feels like the sad decline of a country so focused on producing innovation for profit rather than utility, that it ends up with gorgeous smartphones for recording every moment of the fires but no technology to save itself. Celebrities might be able to swim in another villa’s pool, but countless others are left living in the aftermath of the disaster, confined to a camp tent with nothing more than the few belongings they managed to save.
@joannasteinbach6 #hollywood #fyourpage #losangeles #viral_video #fyourpage ♬ i was only temporary - my head is empty
In this collision of expectations and disasters—and almost mimicking Zuckerberg’s move of Meta abandoning its grand fact-checking initiative because, let’s face it, Elon Musk has already “won the elections”—we are presented with the image that best encapsulates the catastrophe.
Like so many images of our times, it’s a short video, in vertical format, and it went viral—shared by everyone from British pop star Billie Eilish to the Italian designer Fabio Novembre (who posted a still version; who knows why). It’s an image too beautiful to be true: there’s the Hollywood sign—note, with three L’s, HOLLLYWOOD, though no one seemed to notice—flames everywhere, the sense of death and destruction, L.A.’s iconic slender palm trees, and a fiery red sky.A fantasy image so dramatic it only lacks dragons. As you’ve probably guessed, it was created by generative AI.
Why does it work so well? Because it perfectly captures the essence of the situation. And it’s plausible, even though it’s not real at all.

In a time when truth and falsehood overlap so quickly as to become inextricable, and when the notion that a lie is merely an opinion gains traction, what use do we have for the truth?
Probably none. In the future, we should brace ourselves for an era of plausible journalism. A quick browse of Adobe Stock’s paid image platform confirmed this. Until a few days ago, searching for images of the Los Angeles fires didn’t yield photographs taken by photojournalists but AI-generated reconstructions. One such image, depicting a sleek modern villa with a pool engulfed in flames, the sun faintly visible on the left, and an overwhelming sense of impending disaster, was so convincing that we momentarily considered publishing it on Domus. Now, we have the chance: this image is a masterpiece. It’s even poetry, as Aristotle might argue—because while history recounts what happened, poetry imagines what could have happened. “Poetry tends to express universals, while history expresses particulars,” he wrote in Poetics.

A few weeks ago, during a launch event for a new Xiaomi smartphone, a Google representative showcased the progress made by Gemini, Mountain View’s generative AI. At one point, the representative asked the phone about the best time to take photos at the iconic East Side Gallery, a section of the Berlin Wall turned into a tourist attraction along the Spree River. Establishing that the best time was before dawn, Gemini also generated an image showing exactly what kind of photo the representative could take by waking up at an hour when most people hadn’t even left Berghain yet, braving Berlin’s cold, traffic, and everything else. But at that point… why bother? The photo was already there, perfect. As beautiful as only the plausible can be.