Fake Photo of Slot Player on Fake SNL News Sparks Real Anger
Posted on: December 16, 2025, 10:09h.
Last updated on: December 16, 2025, 11:43h.
- On last Saturday’s “Weekend Update,” a photo of a woman playing a casino slot machine on oxygen sparked anger because it was AI-generated
- Fans and industry observers criticized the move for diminishing the joke’s humor while raising concerns about AI’s elimination of creative jobs
It’s usually a sharp one‑liner on “Saturday Night Live’s” “Weekend Update” segment that stirs outrage. This time, it was the image accompanying the joke.
During Saturday’s broadcast, co-host Colin Jost quipped: “This week, President Trump led a rally celebrating his handling of the economy, which, for some reason, he held at a casino in the Poconos. Which is kind of weird to say: the future is brighter than ever. Isn’t that right, woman on oxygen playing the nickel slots?”
Over the weekend, only a few seemed to notice that the slot player depicted in the photo appeared uncannily half-sketched. By Tuesday, the debate lit up the internet and even made its way to the Hollywood trade website Deadline, which screenshotted the photo and ran it through Hive’s AI detector.
The result: a 99.9% likelihood that the image was AI-generated.
Generating Controversy
AI can churn out dozens of images before human artists can even begin sketching. According to Challenger, Gray & Christmas, a workforce consultancy that tracks layoffs, between 4,000-5,000 job losses have been explicitly attributed to AI since 2023, mostly in the tech and creative sectors. And the World Economic Forum projects that up to 26% of all tasks in arts, design and media roles could be automated by generative AI by 2030.
“What they know is most people won’t notice and even fewer will care,” tweeted writer Gillian Branstetter. “This is really how AI will spread.”
Critics also argue that AI trains itself on vast datasets of existing artwork, usually without the consent of its creators, creating ethical minefields around copyright and ownership.
Mostly, though, the gripes from “SNL” fans, industry observers — and even one former “SNL” writer — noted that the faked slot player photo rendered the sketch less funny.
“At SNL I worked with artists who made the funniest, stupidest graphics in no time flat,” wrote Billy Domineau on Bluesky. “Some of my biggest jokes would have been impossible without these geniuses building an insane image or finding the perfect real-life photo of a politician.”
Josh Billinson, a senior social media editor at Semafor, tweeted that the gag fell flat because “SNL” abandoned its trademark “bad Photoshop” aesthetic. “The intentionally kind of janky photoshops are part of the joke,” he explained.
While mainstream journalism standards preclude the use of AI-generated photos in real news stories unless they are clearly labeled as such — and “SNL”’s photo was not — “Weekend Update” is also not a real newscast.
Incidentally, this was the second consecutive “Weekend Update” to use a casino as a punchline. On December 6, Jost’s co-host, Michael Che, joked that the recently approved Bally’s casino project in the Bronx was appropriate because “every visit to the Bronx is a gamble.”
No comments yet