Posted on: December 16, 2025, 10:09h.
Last updated on: December 16, 2025, 10:10h.
It’s usually a sharp one‑liner on “Weekend Update” 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 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% probability that the image was AI-generated.
Generating Controversy
AI can produce dozens of images before humans can even begin sketching. According to Challenger, Gray & Christmas, a workforce consultancy that tracks layoffs, between 4,000-5,000 job losses were 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.
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 just wasn’t 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.
Ironically, the live comedy show lampooned AI photo generation itself just weeks earlier. A sketch appearing in its November 15 episode mocked apps that animate old pictures into absurd hallucinations – from a grandmother smoking a hot dog to bowling balls levitating in mid-air.
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