Saturday Night Live Perfectly Lampoons AI-Generated Photos

A Saturday Night Live skit featuring actor Glen Powell has mercilessly mocked AI-edited photographs by playing on the inherent flaws of the technology.

Apps that animate photos to life have been a thing for a while now. Virtually every major AI platform can do it, including Midjourney, OpenAI’s Sora, Google, and even X’s AI Grok. But anyone who has used these apps knows that the AI is prone to making mistakes.

In the live skit above, a group of children go to visit their grandmother in a retirement home on Thanksgiving. But as a treat, they’ve brought a box of photos they discovered at home, which they’ve scanned into an AI app.

First, they show Grandma a photo of her Dad (Glen Powell), who comes to life like a Hogwarts portrait, harmlessly waving and moving around.

But things start to go awry when they show grandma a photo of her mother and father. The mom is holding a hot dog and a cigarette, and when the AI brings the photo to life, the mom starts smoking the hot dog instead of the cigarette. This is not an exaggeration of how AI works; while it can do basic movements, it struggles with more intricate actions, such as smoking. Even though this is a skit, AI image generators have made very similar mistakes before.

“Why did my mother smoke her hot dog?” asks the bewildered grandmother. “Sometimes the AI is weird,” explains one of the grandchildren. But things get really strange when the great-grandfather picks up the family dog, Sadie, who is missing a head.

The skit gets increasingly odd as her father’s friend takes off her trousers to reveal a Ken doll crotch, her mother missing her bottom half, and even a nuclear bomb goes off. The parody even makes reference to the credits system that many AI companies have introduced — including Adobe.

Despite the brilliant riff by SNL, there have been people espousing the benefits of the technology: Alexis Ohanian, the Reddit founder, shared a clip of himself and his mom from when he was a young boy that was brought to life with AI.