It looked convincing enough to set off a wave of worried phone calls.
A photo circulating on Nextdoor showed a mountain lion supposedly prowling a backyard in Sacramento’s Lemon Hill neighborhood, and within hours neighbors were locking up pets and warning each other to stay inside.
There was just one problem. The image was fake. The picture had been digitally altered, most likely with an AI image generator, and that the big cat never existed. Wildlife officers who looked into the report turned up no tracks, no sightings, and no lion…