His name is Athos Salome, and I’m pretty sure he’s not real
If you regularly find yourself on “fringe” news websites like I do, or if you just use TikTok a bunch like everyone else does, chances are you’ve locked steely eyes with Athos Salome at some point recently.
He’s a Brazilian psychic who says the world, and especially the United States, has some rough stuff to look forward to in 2024.
For starters, he claims World War III will start this year.
And … yeah, duh. Of course it will. The quirk here is that, according Salome, it will start as a result of an incident in the South China Sea as opposed to erupting from one of the obvious places like Ukraine or Palestine.
He also adds a highly alarming tag to that prediction by claiming the United States will be invaded in 2024 after the country is “betrayed.”
Another prediction claims a new virus will spread from the South Pole and, of course, it’s gonna be so much worse than Covid-19.
On the bright side, those of us who don’t succumb to Arctic-24 or whatever we decide to call it will still be able to talk to our loved ones who do! That’s because Athos swears up and down that this will FINALLY be the year that artificial intelligence allows us to talk to our dead loved ones.
Presumably that will happen mere moments before AI becomes way too smart and we lose control of it entirely, as Salome predicted in 2023.
Now, before you laugh this off, you should know he’s been right about some pretty huge events before. Like how he is alleged to have predicted the arrival of Covid-19 way back in 2012.
I have found zero evidence of that prediction actually having happened or even the text of how he worded it, but I’m sure that documentation is forthcoming someday.
In the meantime, if you want a prediction you can take to the bank, have a gander at this 2022 article where Athos Salome accurately predicts the teams that will meet in the finals of that year’s World Cup. Sure enough, that article was published well before the finals happened.
If you’re not exactly impressed with someone nailing an outcome that any number of sports analysts probably also predicted, you’re not alone. This is the point where I actually started getting a little suspicious.
I’m not suspicious about whether this guy is really a psychic or not. I assume he is not, even with the World Cup article’s mentions of him also “predicting” the war in Ukraine and the death of Queen Elizabeth II. Those both strike me as way easier to predict than the outcome of the World Cup final (which he only got half right, by the way, he picked the wrong winner).
My suspicions go deeper than that. To put it bluntly, I don’t think Athos Salome is a real person. And just to clarify, I don’t mean that some real person is out there pretending to be Athos Salome. I mean I don’t think the person in those pictures exists.
I think Athos Salome might be the world’s first AI-generated Nostradamus.
Along with the suggestion that predicting the teams in a World Cup final requires Nostradamus-level abilities, the thing that really set off alarm bells for me when it comes to Athos Salome was his “first accurate prediction of 2024.”
It is alleged that, back in December, Salome told an outlet called The Daily Star that a massive solar flare would hit Earth in 2024 and, whoops, that happened.
The article I linked to there is from a legitimate outlet called Space.com. That’s important because something about reading the words “solar flares” and “predict” together jogged a memory of a similar thing I read on Space.com last year.
I’m not saying the people behind that AI program are also responsible for unleashing Athos Salome on the world, but I am absolutely saying a computer could very easily be responsible for that solar flare prediction of his.
I am also saying a computer could be responsible for that face. For one thing, you have to admit, it doesn’t look very “face” like, you know? It looks like what would happen if you asked ChatGPT to spit out a picture of Nostradamus 2K24.
Surely I’d be able to put my concerns to rest by watching some videos of Athos Salome in action.
The first place my online searches took me was the multitude of TikTok videos about Athos Salome’s predictions, which pull in hundreds of thousands …
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… and sometimes millions …
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… of views. Watch either of those videos, though, and you’ll notice that actual video of Athos Salome himself is conspicuously absent.
I thought that was weird, so I tracked down his verified Instagram page and was relived to find that there was indeed video to be watched. Then I was dismayed to find said video was just a bunch of still images in an animated slide show.
https://instagram.com/p/Cm4FxS_Bmqs/
That’s nothing a robot can’t do these days. There is some basic “person talking to a camera” kind of stuff to be found in his Instagram stories, but my robot concerns stand. Deepfake technology has absolutely advanced to the point that a convincing video of that type can be done, especially if you have no concept of what the person in the video actually talks or sounds like.
Where’s the video of him doing dumb shit like this?
Why is the grainy podcast video you briefly see in this TikTok video the only footage of this renowned “living Nostradamus” talking his talk?
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Again, there’s nothing about that footage that couldn’t be faked using the various AI creation tools of the world. If he was willing to go on whatever that show is, why wouldn’t we see clips of him from more shows?
Meanwhile, over at the official Athos Salome YouTube page, there exists exactly one video, and it’s just some random dude assuring us that Athos Salome is real.
I did see some signs of life at his official Facebook page in that it’s followed by damn near 10,000 people. But it’s also locked to anyone other than Athos’s friends. I did send a friend request. I’ll let you know if he approves me when I check Facebook again 16 months from now.
There was another lead on his Facebook, though, in the form of a Linktree. There, among links to that locked Facebook and an also locked Twitter (currently known as X) account, is a LinkedIn page. Now we’re getting somewhere!
On that LinkedIn page is a “contact info” link and, when you click that link …
… it takes you right back to his LinkedIn page.
Look, I’m not going to pretend to know or bother to guess what the fuck is going on here, but something the fuck is going on here.
One thing that I failed to mention about that solar flare prediction that has TikTok all in a tizzy is that it accompanied another prediction, which was that the solar flare would be followed by “three days of darkness.”
If those words sent a chill down your spine and you aren’t sure why, it’s because that phrase, while originating with Catholicism, is uncomfortably close to the Qanon idea of “ten days of darkness.” That’s the period of unrest that will follow “The Storm,” which is that inevitable moment in future history where Democrats get eaten by the State for drinking baby blood or whatever the fuck.
We are living in a world where an uncomfortably large segment of the population abides by the Qanon version of world events.
We are also living in a world where AI technology can predict world events and create a face out of thin air to share those predictions with whoever wants to listen.
Here’s hoping those two worlds never collide!