Matt Selman Escalates His War on Fake ‘Simpsons’ Predictions
As the internet speculates over whether Sean “P. Diddy” Combs has already fled the country following a litany of lawsuits against him and a series of federal raids of his residences, only one thing is known for sure — The Simpsons didn’t do it.
The question of whether or not Diddy did all the disgusting deeds of which he is accused by numerous women, ranging from physical and sexual abuse to full-on human trafficking, will, hopefully, find an answer from a jury at some point in the near future, assuming that the music mogul and alleged predatory monster hasn’t already purchased a villa in a country without an extradition treaty.
But as is the case any time a public figure of Diddy’s level of power, fame and wealth unravels in real time, Diddy’s fall from grace amidst a mounting pile of accusations and video evidence has been the subject of rampant speculation by the vocally uninformed and terminally online, and none of those tweets and TikToks will be admissible in court — or on Fox Sunday’s Animation Domination.
After security footage from 2016 showing Diddy savagely beating his then-girlfriend Cassie Ventura surfaced earlier this week, an apparent screenshot from The Simpsons showing a Diddy-esque character running from law enforcement at an airport tarmac went viral on TikTok and Twitter as the internet’s most gullible declared that The Simpsons has, yet again, predicted pop culture events perfectly.
Today, Simpsons showrunner Matt Selman told those dupes, “The fuck we did!”
@blocklegend7
“In the current era of digital misinformation, The Simpsons ‘predictions’ (or, more accurately, ‘coincidences’) have become meaningless,” Selman told TMZ in a statement about the viral and fabricated image that was certainly not featured in the show he’s been working on for nearly three decades. “Any goofball can whip up an A.I. 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.”
Selman explained the phenomenon of folks declaring Simpsons writers to be psychics in terms simple enough for them to understand, saying, “If you study history, you will be able to ‘predict’ the future because the foolishness of humanity repeats itself. 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.”
Earlier this year, Selman attempted to teach the same lesson when a similar A.I.-generated Simpsons screenshot supposedly proving that the series predicted the deadly Baltimore bridge collapse went viral. Selman tweeted at the time, “People so desperately want to believe in the show’s ‘magic powers’ (or are just very lazy) that they ignore that obviously fake images of the so-called predictions cannot be traced to any actual episode.”
Sadly, the proliferation of publicly available A.I. tools and the decline of baseline media literacy are formidable foes for Selman in his crusade against brain-rotting attention-seekers who are still cashing in on the clicks from The Simpsons’ accidental prediction of the Trump presidency. But if bullshit Simpsons predictions are the monorail to Selman’s Marge, then I hope he finds the help necessary to win this fight for all our sakes — someone send up the Bat Signal.
