
If you've been anywhere near retro gaming social media circles over the past weekend, you'll almost certainly have seen some Japanese adverts for various vintage consoles featuring scantily-clad ladies.
As you can imagine, these "lost" promotional images have triggered a pretty big online response, with many people assuming they are legitimate historical items which show just how "great" everything was a few decades ago – which, of course, they're not.
These fake adverts are yet another dubious "benefit" we've been blessed with thanks to the arrival of Generative AI, and are no more real than the Easter Bunny.
That hasn't stopped thousands of people from re-sharing them online and leaving predictably asinine comments.
Not everyone was fooled, however – after all, a quick look at the Dreamcast VMU and the dodgy screenshots at the bottom is all you need to alert you to this being AI slop.
Hopefully, you didn't get fooled – but this goes beyond merely being a 'bit of fun' and shows how difficult it's going to be to properly document and preserve gaming history as time goes on. Will we even be able to trust the images people dig up relating to retro games and hardware in the next ten years?