Readers of the satirical publication The Onion noticed something surprising today: it had used an AI-generated picture on a new article, despite the paper’s CEO Ben Collins recently promising that “we don’t use AI.”
The image of a lizard-like, humanoid face accompanied an article titled “Monster Devastated To See Film Depicting Things He Told Guillermo Del Toro In Confidence.”
“Come on man, not the AI art,” one Bluesky user who spotted the image wrote in a post, highlighting a growing dissent against publications moving away from paying human artists and using lazily AI-generated illustrations instead.
Creators have long argued that the tech not only marks the death of originality, but cheapens human creativity and undermines the livelihoods of artists. A number of copyright infringement lawsuits involving AI art are currently working their way through the courts.
In the case of the Onion, though, it sounds like an innocent mistake — and one the acclaimed publication quickly worked to rectify.
“Hi! Quick note,” Collins wrote on Bluesky, minutes after news of the AI image started to spread. “The Onion accidentally posted a stock photo from a vendor with an AI-generated image in it.”
Indeed, the image is being sold by the stock image website Shutterstock, which lists it as being “generated by an Artificial Intelligence system.” The face was superimposed onto a separate image of a living room and used to illustrate the article.
“We pulled the post down once we found that out,” Collins added. “Our commitment to not using AI is very real. It’s in the union contract to disclose it if we ever do.”
“World is a slop minefield and we’re sorry,” Collins concluded, referring to an internet-wide infestation of lazily AI-generated slop that’s drowning out entire social media platforms.
Collins’ actions appear to have appeased the publication’s readers.
“Thank you for handling that so promptly,” one Bluesky user wrote in reply. “Would hate to see The Onion go down that route.”
“Glad to hear that you’re working to unfuck this, it would be real disappointing if you didn’t,” another added.
The incident highlights the ubiquitousness of AI-generated art flooding the stock image market. While the lizard face the Onion used for its article seems fairly harmless in the greater context, machine-generated images can have far more nefarious purposes — like in late 2023, when software giant Adobe was caught selling AI-generated images of violence in Palestine.
Just earlier this week, an in-house designer wrote in a post on Reddit that “AI is slowly ruining stock websites.”
“I usually find something on Adobe Stock, download it, modify it to look less generic, and then I’m on my way,” the user wrote. “It’s not my favorite stock website but it’s included in my office’s [Adobe Creative Cloud] account so I use it fairly frequently.”
“But these AI-generated keep slipping through even when I hit ‘exclude Generative AI,’ they added. “What’s frustrating is that I’ll download the asset and when I’m editing it in Illustrator it has the unfinished uncanny edges of an AI image. Yuck. Unusable.”
Even Google’s search website has been infiltrated by a massive amount of dubious AI-generated art, to the degree that top results for famous human artists now sometimes include fake, AI-generated versions of their work.
In short, it’s unlikely the last time we’ll see a publication accidentally use AI-generated art — a sad sign of what’s still to come as the tech becomes even more ubiquitous.
More on AI art: Self-Styled “AI Artist” Furious That People Are “Blatantly Stealing My Work”
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