Abandoned McDonald’s picture near Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant real or fake?

On 2 May 2024, an abandoned McDonald’s picture went viral. This McDonald’s restaurant is situated near the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Pripyat Ukraine. Let’s be clear whether this picture is real or not!!

Background of this picture:

A Twitter user named @CheburekiMan posted a picture at 6:45 AM on 2 May 2024. In the post, he uploaded a picture of a tall building of a McDonald’s restaurant. The restaurant building is almost completely abandoned. In the caption, the user mentioned that this picture was taken in Pripyat near the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant. Which is the site of the worst disaster of 1986 in the history of Nuclear power generation. 

What’s the truth!!

Later, the user who posted this image mentioned in his reply that this picture was an “obvious AI image, ” proving that the abandoned McDonald’s picture was unreal. 

On 3 May 2024, another Twitter (X) user @IMTanuki posted a tweet with another fake image. He laughed in his post with the caption that I was in Chornobyl last week and took a photo of McDonald’s and joked that the abandoned McDonald’s is “right down the street from Reactor 4.  

The Picture’s reality:

As the user @CheburekiMan later mentioned in his post the picture is an AI image. This picture was created by Agentcooper1974 a Reddit user, by using a Midjourney artificial-intelligence generation platform. Another similar AI-generated post titled “Brutalist Fast Food Restaurant in Eastern Europe and Russia” was also posted on January 2024 by this user. 

Some other AI-generated restaurant pictures:

Agentcooper1947 posted a series of AI-generated pictures on Reddit.  These pictures were created on Midjourney by typing the text prompt “a photo of a large brutalist “restaurant name” fast food chain restaurant in ‘place”.

These AI-generated pictures are shared by many people on different social media accounts. The same picture was posted with the title “McDonald’s: Fallout wasteland branch”. Another same photo is used by a TikTok user who posted a video with this abandoned McDonald’s picture. 

An AI-generated image of McDonald’s Ronald spider-like was posted on 28 April on Facebook.