Communicating the Crisis or Misinforming the Public? Analyzing the AI-Generated Visual Rhetoric of the 2025 California Wildfires (opens in new tab)

In January 2025, catastrophic wildfires devastated Southern California, prompting a surge in AI-generated visuals across social media. While these visuals might have aimed to raise awareness, they have also distorted perceptions of the crisis’s scale, intensifying public fear and complicating emergency responses. This study depends on Foss’s visual rhetoric model to systematically examine the visual rhetoric of AI-generated visuals that spread during the wildfires. Through qualitative and qua...