Combining the Artemis mission and AI will fuel a new surge of moon landing deniers

On my phone, there are already videos of the next moon landing. In one, an astronaut springs off the rung of a ladder, strung out from the lander, before slowly plopping to the surface. He is, alas, still getting accustomed to the weaker gravity.

In another, the crew collects a sample—a classic lunar expedition activity—while another person lazily minds the rover. A third video shows an astronaut affixing the American flag to the ground, because this act of patriotism is even better the second time around. The blue oceans of Earth are visible, in the background, and a radio calls out: “Artemis crew is on the surface.”

America is going back to the moon, and NASA is in the final weeks of preparing for the Artemis II mission, which will have astronauts conduct a lunar flyby for the first time in decades. If all goes well, during the next endeavor, Artemis III, they’ll finally land on the lunar surface, marking an extraordinary and historical and in some sense, nostalgic, accomplishment. The aforementioned videos are not advance copies, or some vision of the future, though. They were generated with OpenAI’s video generation model and are extremely fake. 

Still, this kind of content is a reminder that the upcoming Artemis missions promise a major epistemic test for the deniers of the original moon landing. This a small but passionate and enduring community who doubt the Apollo moon landing for a host of reasons, including that (they allege) the government lied or (they believe) it is simply physically impossible for humans to go the moon. Now, when NASA returns to the lunar surface, these people will be confronted with far more evidence than from the last time around. The space agency operation will be broadcast, live, and including camera technology and social media platforms that just weren’t around in the 1960s.

But there’s also a bigger challenge before us. NASA will be launching its moon return effort in a period of major distrust in American scientific and government institutions, and, amid the proliferation of generative AI, declining confidence in the veracity of digital content. Most observers will be able to sort through the real NASA imagery, and anything fake that might show up. Still, there tends to be a small number of people who doubt these kinds of milestones, especially when a U.S. federal agency is involved. 

Adding AI to the conspiracy theory cocktail

“When the moon landing first came in, AI wasn’t a thing. The sophistication of [the landing] didn’t necessarily make us question it,” says David Jolley, a professor at the University of Nottingham who studies conspiracy theories. “But now, with the power of AI and the power of images that you can create, it certainly offers that different reality if you want to interpret it in that way.”

“It’s the trust in those sources that we need to kind of really create. Of course, if you haven’t got trust in our gatekeepers and you don’t trust scientists, well, suddenly you are going to lean into: well, this, is this real? Is this just AI?” he continues.

The upcoming Artemis missions aren’t yet a major topic among lunar landing deniers. But there are hints it will attract more attention from conspiracy theorists. During the last Artemis mission, which was unmanned, Reuters had to push back on online posts suggesting the expedition “proved” that Apollo 11 didn’t actually happen. (Skeptics suggested longer Artemis I mission timelines, a product of a change in route, actually cast doubt on the original Apollo timeline). 

Other online skeptics have already suggested that, with Artemis, NASA is yet again faking a space endeavor. Some people in internet conspiracy communities suggest the upcoming moon missions will be entirely CGI (computer-generated imagery). 

Generative AI stands to introduce even more confusion, says Ben Colman, the CEO of Reality Defenders, a deep fake detection platform. Generating a believable image of a (fake) moon landing is now something any consumer can do. “Any astute physicist will be able to tell you if these videos get star placement or physics wrong, as they are likely to do,” he says, “but even that is getting better with each model iteration.”

Conspiracy theories are sticky

There are, of course, many reasons why people say they deny reality of the first lunar expeditions. They are canonical, misinterpreted references, like Van Allen belts, a zone of energetic charged particles that surrounds the planet (critics say the belts are too radioactive for manned vehicles to traverse)  and the suspicious flag-in-the-wind (there’s no wind on the moon!). All of these points—and the many other points deniers bring up—have been thoroughly debunked.

Still, this small community of self-appointed detectives are insistent. Even decades after the missions ended, people are still combing through NASA’s videos and images, mining for signs of alternations or other surreptitious editing. To them, an expected shimmer reveals a film operation just beyond the view of the camera. A movement that might not look right is a hint that the world has been duped. Open source intelligence (OSINT) becomes the rabbit hole. 

“Some allege we didn’t go to the moon, perhaps because we were trying to trick the Soviets into thinking that we had superior technology than they did,” explains Joseph Uscinski, a political scientist at the University of Miami who also studies conspiratorial beliefs. “Some people think we did go but it wasn’t televised. And that footage that we saw was made later in a sound studio. Some people think Stanley Kubrick was in charge of filming the ‘faked’ Moon Landing footage.”

For its part, NASA is preparing to point to evidence, should any deepfake allegations come their way. Agency spokesperson Lauren Low tells Fast Company: “We expect AI experts will be looking closely at all our images and will be able to verify they are real images taken by real astronauts as part of the Artemis II test flight around the Moon.” Moreover, Low added, there will be many ways for people to watch the lunar flyby themselves, including live broadcasts, two 24/7 YouTube streams, a new conference, and “views from Orion cameras.” In other words, the reality of Artemis will be very hard to deny.

Research suggests that conspiracy theories are entertaining, and even serve peoples’ core psychological needs, like  a desire to understand the world or a way of dealing with uncertainty. Finding other people, including on social media, pushing these theories can help normalize them, and make someone feel like they’re part of a broader community.

Some people simply don’t trust institutions, and evidence that something did, indeed, happen only raises further questions, and suspicions that it didn’t. To an extent, politics matters, too; people outside the United States are more likely to deny the moon landing, polls show. 

In the end, says Uscinski, we should prepare for people who are prone to conspiratorial thinking, or prone to mistrusting institutions, to take a skeptical view of any big news event. This may happen again when the Artemis missions finally launch. “The good news is that belief in conspiracy theories isn’t likely to get worse,” he explains. “The bad news is that this conspiratorial thinking has always been this pervasive.”

“People are very good at waving away evidence that tells them things they don’t want to hear, and they’re very good at believing things, either without evidence or with really shitty evidence when it tells them what they do want to believe about the world,” Uscinski adds. “You don’t need AI or sophisticated technology to provide a justification.”

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