Communicating the Crisis or Misinforming the Public? Analyzing the AI-Generated Visual Rhetoric of the 2025 California Wildfires

In January 2025, catastrophic wildfires devastated Southern California, prompting a surge in AI-generated visuals across social media. While these visuals might have aimed to raise awareness, they have also distorted perceptions of the crisis’s scale, intensifying public fear and complicating emergency responses. This study depends on Foss’s visual rhetoric model to systematically examine the visual rhetoric of AI-generated visuals that spread during the wildfires. Through qualitative and quantitative analyses of visuals shared on X, we analyze the rhetorical strategies and purposes behind these visuals and assess public sentiment toward them. Our findings reveal how visual generative AI amplifies both the communicative power and the risks of misinformation in crisis visuals. The study contributes to the growing body of scholarship on visual misinformation and crisis communication. It offers empirical insights into how AI-generated visuals shape public perception during crises. The study concludes with theoretical and practical implications.