‘Saturday Night Live’ Fans Are Furious After Allegedly Identifying A.I. Art in “Weekend Update”

This past Saturday Night, 30 Rockefeller Plaza unveiled something that fans found to be more tacky, wasteful and energy-intensive than a 75-foot Christmas tree covered in LED lights.

The insidious adoption of artificial intelligence tools in every corner of every creative industry is arguably the most hot-button issue of the American artistic community at the moment. Whether it’s a movie poster, some voice modulation or an entire artificial “actor,” any time one of the traditional titans of the entertainment world rolls out a new computer-generated product, they’re bound to get backlash from longtime fans who prefer it when their favorite movie characters have the correct number of fingers.

As such, when Colin Jost and Michael Che took the Weekend Update desk on the most recent episode of Saturday Night Live and delivered their usual topical jokes with the accompaniment of some suspicious-looking graphics, fans of SNL were quick to accuse the show of using artificial intelligence at the expense of human creativity, and, possibly, human jobs.

If Lorne Michaels really wants A.I. to take over the graphics work on the beloved Saturday Night Live segment as some viewers think he does, he’s going to have a hard time convincing the fandom not to hate it, especially given the show’s track record with robots.

While we can’t say for sure whether or not the “woman on oxygen playing the nickel slots” that Jost referenced in one of the opening jokes of the segment is the creation of generative A.I., she certainly does have that vacant expression and artificially warm tone typically associated with A.I. images to go along with the inexplicable placement of her hands – although, to be fair, a lot of casino-goers in real life sport a similar look.

Nevertheless, the internet has already jumped to the conclusion that Saturday Night Live is soft-launching the use of A.I. in their production process, which has had a predictably frenzying effect on the SNL fandom:

One former Saturday Night Live writer even joined in the outrage on Bluesky, as Billy Domineau wrote, “At SNL I worked with artists who made the funniest, stupidest graphics in no time flat. 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.” 

“Sucks that their work is being pushed aside for slop,” Domineau lamented, although he added the caveat, “If I’m wrong and this image isn’t AI, sincerest apologies to the show and the artist who made it! But it definitely looks like AI to me.”

Sadly, this exact uncertainty when it comes to the kinds of uncanny graphics that have long typified Weekend Update will only become more commonplace the more A.I. “art” seeps into the entire media industry. Actual artists are already suffering from A.I. accusations for work that is entirely human-made, but as these tools become more advanced, so will the A.I. paranoia, as every piece of art in our culture will be met with suspicion from the A.I.-averse.

But, hey, that might be the exact goal of the A.I. companies currently sucking up the world’s dwindling fresh water like some massive, misanthropic sponge – once we can’t tell what’s real and what’s fake, we won’t give a shit about anything at all.

Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: feeds.feedburner.com