The viral photo of Malaga created by artificial intelligence

Millions of people have been fooled by an AI-generated photo showing a bunch of people on the shore of a Malaga beach.

The photo, created by Malaga journalist Matías Zavia, immediately went viral on Friday 22 September and gained more than four million hits online. But it's not until you zoom out of the photo that you actually read the word; Malaga. "The photographer is a genius," people commented online.

But it was mostly the work of artificial intelligence. It's the latest AI toy called Gliff, and it allows users to combine images with words "hidden" within the photo itself. It is simple to use: you tell the tool what you want to write, in what font size and within a certain context and a photo will be generated.

In the case of the Malaga photo, it was requested through the Gliff to produce a photo of a beach with the word Malaga.

As a close-up, it just looks like any beach with a group of people on the sand, but as you zoom out you can see that the word Malaga is disguised among the formation of those people on the sand, as well as the beach chairs, tables and umbrellas.

The image was downloaded so many times on the app itself that it went down on the first weekend of its launch.