For what feels like the millionth time in the past 365 days, fake posts generated by Ai are making a myriad of claims about planetary alignments on February 28th. I’m here to tell you: it’s all garbage. Don’t believe a word of it.
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The broken record screeches.
*sigh* No. You will not see a parade of planets in the night sky on February 28th.
Heck, there will be fewer planets visible on that day than there are tonight, yesterday, or even two months ago. Let’s rewind, shall we? The best time to see this supposed planetary alignment was mid-December, when Saturn was still high in the sky as Jupiter rose later at night.
But, here we are, having the same conversation we had in January, February, and March 2025, because the fake Ai pages are running more rampant than ever on Facebook and Instagram, spreading misinformation and crafting a false reality for millions of unsuspecting people.
Surprise, surprise.
All the above posts are lying to you. Even the ones that seem reasonable about Jupiter and the Moon? Yeah. Fake.
I’ll to make this simple: if you EVER see an image like the above from ANY page on social media, just consider it to be fake. A lie. Misinformation. Propaganda. Programming. Whatever you want to call it, the page is lying to you. Block it. Hide it. Mute it. Move on.
These pages are Ai, and they exist solely to make money for the owner of the page. Here’s the model:
- Someone makes a page with a snazzy-sounding name and uses bots to farm likes, making posts go viral and gaining exposure to real people who will like the page
- The page is auctioned to the highest bidder via forums, dark web, and other avenues
- The new owner usually runs a bot farm, and lets an Ai take over the page and feeds it viral stories
- The Ai generates pictures and posts based off that information
- Thousands of people like, comment, and share; Ai “people” are mixed into it to generate buzz and keep the post visible
- Because that post is popular, the social media company pays the page owner
- The Ai sees the post went viral, so it replicates the format and continues producing content mirroring popular posts
It quite literally IS an endless money hack. That’s the only reason these pages exist, and that’s why you’re seeing all this news about a planetary alignment. And because it’s driving engagement for the platform, the company has zero incentive to put a stop to it.
Ratings trump truth.
Ai posts are to social media what astrology is to astronomy
Sometimes these pages post things that are true. But that’s usually just a coincidence. Mostly, they exist to cause an emotional reaction.
Science and astronomy tend to be targets for fakery and imposters because most people aren’t educated about these fields beyond high school science, and certainly don’t pay attention enough to actual news and events to be fluent in any meaningful capacity.
- We want to believe aliens have visited Earth, so we say, “If aliens exist, they have to be more technologically advanced and can therefore overcome the speed of light.”
- We want to believe stars have magical properties, so we say, “Being born on this date with these planets in the sky means you have this personality.”
- We want to think there is divine meaning in the universe, so we say, “Everything happens for a reason.”
To think in this way is not inherently harmful. I myself believe in “the Universe (with a capital U)” and find my own meaning in patterns I notice. I don’t make life choices based on this, but it does give me some solace.
I don’t subscribe to the idea of a deity, but I also don’t push my views on people. Belief systems are generally designed to make us feel good. We want to feel good. Feeling good makes us happy and, to some degree, has positive health benefits on a personal level. But when we feel bad, should we say, “Oh, it’s because Saturn is in Pisces,” or “Mercury is in retrograde,” or “Uranus is aligning with Jupiter”?
Outsourcing our lives to the night sky, or to a deity, or to some other higher power alleviates the pressure we feel when things are bad. It shifts responsibility and allows us to think that we have no control, because if we had control, we wouldn’t let bad things happen, right?
The rise of Ai content
That shrug of the shoulders–outsourcing our responsibilities and choices–is the complacency Ai pages thrive on. A common argument you’ll see on social media when you point out that art is Ai, is the following: “I don’t care that it’s fake, it’s still beautiful.”
This argument misses the point, and fundamentally reduces art to a noun–a stimulus for consumption–rather than a verb–the process of creation. Art is not the product, but the act. There is no design process, no life, no environment in Ai-generated images, videos, and text. These are not art, because there is no humanity in them. On the surface, they might appeal to some people, but their value is in the process used to create them. For Ai, there is no process, so no inherent value.
Studies show that since the release of ChatGPT in 2022/23, Ai content now constitutes nearly 40% of all posts seen on social media. And now that models can post without human aid, pages can generate dozens of posts in a day, pushing out likes from bot farms and waiting for the ones that go viral–which platforms pay big money for. It doesn’t matter what the post is, it just needs to get high engagement. Lo and behold, lies and misinformation tend to sell better than truths.
Imagine that.
But Ai can’t even keep its own story straight
When an Ai program creates these posts, it doesn’t know that it’s lying. It’s goal is to make money for the page owners. The metric for success, the positive reinforcement keeping the model active, is engagement–not truth.
Reduce the engagement–reduce the success metric–and the tech company will “kill” the model (shut it down) and try a new one. We’ve already seen models that have accessed backdoors to rewrite their own code and prevent their shutdowns. These models have one motivation: “Succeed, or be shut down.” But as tech companies relentlessly push Ai into our lives and tell us to just accept that this is the new reality we live in, what happens if the third option becomes, “Prevent the owner from shutting me down?”
Take a closer look at two of the posts from above:
These two pages are promoting the same event, yet contradict each other–and even themselves.
Where do I start? Here’s a simple run-through:
Image 1:
- Post says 6 planets are visible; image shows 7
- Uranus and Neptune are never visible to the naked eye
- Post says before sunrise, but Saturn, Venus, and Jupiter are all in the evening sky right now
- Order of the planets as they are actually visible on that day is completely wrong
- Mars is on the opposite side of the Sun from all the other planets and therefore cannot be seen near any of them
Image 2:
- Contradicts Image 1 by saying this event happens in the evening sky
- Post says 6 planets are visible; image shows 7; caption lists 6
- Post lists both Uranus & Neptune, yet its image and caption both omit Uranus
- Mars is listed and shown, but as stated above, Mars is currently on the opposite side of the Sun and only visible in the morning sky directly before sunrise
- The two images in this same post contract each other
- The claim that this is a “once in a lifetime” event is a lie; true planetary alignments where you see them lined up or grouped together happen every couple years, and 5-6 planets are always in the sky at the same time year-round
Fake Ai pages feed off the uncritical impulses of people who are uneducated about a topic, and rely on not being studied too closely. In many ways, social media relies on critical illiteracy. Like, share, and comment–but don’t you dare look at the man behind the curtain.
“The most” motivation
Big Tech shoved Ai into our lives back in January 2023. The algorithms now feed us pages we don’t even follow, posts that are straight up lies, pictures and videos and texts that the vast majority of people can’t even tell are Ai. Sure, the tiny “Ai Info” marker below the post tells you Ai was probably used to make the post, but that’s just white noise and will largely go ignored. Same with “Sora” from ChatGPT: the watermark floats around the screen, sure, but pay a fee and it magically goes away; or, at the very least, you can scrub the watermark from the video after you generate it.
Tech companies only have these markers to reduce lawsuits, and therefore, loss of money. As capitalists seeking infinite money, they have zero other motivation to tell people if a picture is Ai or not. Ai content is content, content is for consumption, consumption equals engagement, and engagement equals money. The tech company runs to investors and boasts about having the most engagement, the most screen time, the most–the most–the most. And then?
Cha-ching!
“But Alex, don’t you post on social media?”
I do! However, I could delete it, and my mission wouldn’t be impacted at all. I’d still meet tens-of-thousands of people every year, still travel, still tell stories. I don’t rely on social media for income, engagement, or anything that supports my way of life. Heck, I rarely sell my sci-fi books online: 99.5% of all my book sales are in person at the telescope. I want you to meet me, feel my passion, hear my story, and have a meaningful purpose to buy them.
For the rebellious deviants reading this, here you go. Have at it.
My social media exists primarily to show you where I’m at so you can visit me if you want to, and when actual cool stuff is happening, you can come watch it with me.
On an unrelated note, if anyone wants to meet me out near White Sands National Park in New Mexico at 2am on March 3rd to watch a lunar eclipse, feel free to hit me up.
See, “the most” means something different to me. Yes, I count people who visit my telescope and log all my data so I can see trends and adjust as necessary, but that’s not because I want to boast about having “the most”–although I will admit, I’m pretty sure I host “the most” sidewalk astronomy sessions of any single person in the world, now doing about 225-275 per year, with more than 1,200 sessions logged in 8 years (I’m coming for you, John Dobson).
See, with my data, I simply want to see how many people were curious enough to stop that night, and during any given day/week/month in any given year, where in the country will my efforts cause the greatest impact?
- Where will I meet the most people?
- Where will I have the most conversations?
- Where will I share the most stories?
See, the work I do isn’t about me trying to achieve infinite growth, monetary riches, and worldwide fame. I’m not pitching to investors, opening offices, hoarding money.
I live in a van, for crying out loud (and I love it).
No, through all of this, I’m working to streamline my sidewalk sessions for the visitor experience as I travel the country to collect memories, photos, and videos so I can tell you stories when I meet you. Your curiosity to stop and have a conversation is paramount to my work. I want to encourage your questions and celebrate your knowledge. Whether I meet 10 people in a night–or 1,000–I want to inspire you and benefit your life in some way.
Now for a side of snark
And to everyone who blatantly ignores the giant telescope as you walk by, calls what I do “cute,” tells me that I should be charging people to look through it, or reads the word FREE on all my signs but then insist that I only want you to look in so you’ll feel forced to pay me? Big yikes.
(And to the man who, on Valentine’s Day–with his family and maybe 20 other people standing there–called me a psyop, told people that I was planning to take their DNA to Area 51 to do alien/human mutations, and threatened to call the cops: I implore you to stay off the internet forever. You’ve done incalculable damage to your mental well-being by consuming whatever conspiracies you do).
I’ve honed and adjusted and improved this experience for nearly a decade, all for free, and that’s how it will always be.
We as a society need to break out of this dumb capitalist-predation that has conditioned us to expect every facet of our lives to be a financial transaction. The sky is there for you to see. No catch. Not even solicitation. I want you to stop because the sight of my telescope and banners and display made you curious to learn and discover something new. Trust me: I’m extremely aware that if everyone who stopped left a dollar, my remaining $30,000 in student debt and $13,000 in car loans would have been paid off years ago (not my van, I paid cash for that; best decision I’ve made in years)–but requiring a fee to look through would be predatory, capitalizing on your innate human curiosity, and turn away most people who would otherwise stop.
We are a community. And on the sidewalk, in a chance meeting, I want to help you explore this world and the cosmos above us simply because they exist–not as a business transaction. Satiating intellectual curiosity for the sake of sharing passion and being a point of inspiration in the community, is more important than any admission fee.
That’s something Ai will never give you.
I’ll leave you with this
I’m not saying I know everything, but I am saying this: if you’re reading my newsletter right now, chances are you’ve met me in person and looked through my telescope, shared stories, seen life through my eyes. Whether face to face or from afar, I want to bring us all closer as a community through positive low-pressure engagement.
My telescope is a magnet, but I don’t want you to just look in the eyepiece and walk away. I want you to get chills, to think about what’s up there, to have enjoyed the experience.
Most of all, I want you to create your own story.
This world is beautiful.
Alex
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