This AI-Enhanced Photo of Alex Pretti Was Aired by Major News Outlets

Alex Pretti’s VA portrait, left, was enhanced by an AI model, right, which altered his appearance.

The cable news channel MS NOW, formerly MSNBC, aired an AI-edited photo of Alex Pretti, the protester who was killed by border agents in Minneapolis.

MS NOW tells Snopes that it did not make the edit itself, rather it took the image from the internet without realizing that it had been edited.

Many, including podcaster Joe Rogan, criticized MS NOW for making Pretti “appear more handsome”. The edit makes Pretti’s shoulders appear broader, his skin more tanned, and his nose less pronounced.

A spokesperson from MS NOW tells Snopes that the network didn’t make the edit itself, the way Rogan and others have suggested. Indeed, other news organizations, including the Daily Mail and International Business Times, ran the same AI-enhanced image.

The embroidered text on Pretti’s shirt is garbled, a telltale sign of AI.

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The original photo was sourced from the United States Department of Veterans Affairs official portrait of Pretti, where he worked as an intensive care unit (ICU) nurse. That image is a photo of a photo, hence the poor quality. Someone, it’s not clear who (likely an internet user), ran that lo-fi image through a generative AI model to get a clearer image of Pretti.

When feeding an image into an AI model like ChatGPT or Google’s Nano Banana and asking it to improve the quality, the AI takes the image and text as a prompt and creates a novel image. While it will be close to the original photo, it is no longer a representation of reality. AI models also have biases where it tends to make people better-looking, hence why Pretti appears more attractive.

MS NOW did not respond to PetaPixel’s request for clarification.

The Pretti portrait is not the only AI creation that spread misinformation from Minnesota. Another one that purportedly showed the moment Pretti was shot and killed was also AI-generated. Reuters reports the viral image does not match the multiple videos taken of Pretti’s death.

Meanwhile, the White House published a manipulated photo of a protester being arrested — altering the face of Nekima Levy Armstrong so it looked like she was crying with tears streaming down her face when in reality she wore a stoic expression.