About

Image May Contain refers to AI-generated captions shown instead of images to users on Facebook, Instagram and other websites during partial outages of these services. Following an outage which affected Instagram and Facebook on July 3rd, 2019, the captions have become a subject of jokes on social networks.

Origin

At approximately 9:49 AM, EST, on July 3rd, 2019, a partial outage of Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp affected multiple users globally.^[1][2][3] On that day, multiple users on Facebook and Instagram reported seeing captions reading as "Image may contain", followed by an AI-generated description of the image (examples shown below, left and right).

Spread

During the outage, users on Twitter, Facebook and other websites made jokes about the replaced images and posted humorous examples. For example, on July 3rd Twitter user @backlon tweeted one humorous caption (shown below, left), with the tweet gaining 4 retweets and 160 likes in seven hours.^[4] On the same day, user @Oniropolis tweeted about the issue (shown below, right), with the tweet receiving 38 retweets and over 210 likes in three hours.^[5]

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References