No, 'The Simpsons' Did Not Predict Diddy Would Flee The Country

By Andrew Sanford | Celebrity | May 24, 2024 |

By Andrew Sanford | Celebrity | May 24, 2024 |

The Simpsons once made a joke about FOX merging with Disney. That happened. The show referred to a President Trump. 16 years later, Donald Trump became President of the United States. In 1995, an episode set in the future featured a character with a digital watch he could talk to. Chances are, someone you know owns and is often frustrated with a smartwatch. These are but a few examples of the show predicting the future. However, there’s one such story the crew is getting credit for and they want no part of it.

Diddy has fled the country. The rapper and record producer is facing a litany of charges that include sexual assault, sexual harassment, and sex trafficking. The Department of Homeland Security raided several properties tied to the mogul. A video emerged of him assaulting his then-partner Cassie Ventura. The man is a monster, and the chickens are finally coming home to roost. So, like all shitty cowards, he fled. What does that have to do with The Simpsons?

A photo featuring Diddy on an episode of the long-running show has been making the rounds. It shows the rapper, clad in a pink suit he once wore at a red carpet event, fleeing a squad of yellow cops. That’s yellow as in “Springfield residents” not yellow as in “too scared to enter a school building with an active shooter.” It is drawn in the classic Simpsons style and is a fake piece of garbage. TMZ contacted current Simpsons showrunner Matt Selman, and he lambasted the bogus image.

“In the current era of digital misinformation, The Simpsons ‘predictions’ (or, more accurately, ‘coincidences’) have become meaningless,” Selman told TMZ. “Any goofball can whip up an AI image based on a current event and say ‘The Simpsons predicted it!’ — and decent-but-easily-misled folks will believe it because they so very want it to be true.” The image does look legit, but it takes little effort to prove it is fake (unless you’re using a Google search engine).

Understandably, people could get confused, though. The show has been around for over three decades. As Selman points out, longevity is one of the reasons they’ve “predicted” so many events already. “If you study history, you will be able to ‘predict’ the future because the foolishness of humanity repeats itself,” he explained to TMZ. “If you study math, you will know that if the show makes literally tens of thousands of jokes about American society over almost 800 episodes, it would be statistically impossible not to create material that overlaps with what would later happen in real life.”

What Diddy has done is real and damaging to scores of people. Still, someone with too much time and no creative ability generated a fake image that has fooled enough people to get TMZ involved. It is a bleak look at the future of AI, which continues to be used by the worst people for the dumbest things. At least The Simpsons will likely outlive it.