Saturday Night Live Skewers AI Photo Animation Technology in Viral Thanksgiving Skit

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.

'Saturday Night Live' Just Nailed the Problem With AI Products

The cast of "Saturday Night Live" is coming for the sometimes absurd world of AI-generated video. A skit from the show's Nov. 15 episode poked fun at the technology's penchant for some pretty strange glitches. It featured four grandchildren, played by cast members Chloe Fineman, Sarah Sherman, Marcello Hernández and Tommy Brennan, visiting grandmother Ashley Padilla in a nursing home on Thanksgiving. The children tell their grandmother that they uploaded some of her photos to an app that will bring them to life by turning them into short videos. (Apps like MyHeritage's Deep Nostalgia and AliveMoment already offer these types of capabilities. OpenAI's Sora 2 on the other hand generates video from text prompts and allows users to insert their own likeness.) The AI animation begins innocently enough with Glen Powell, who is portraying the woman's deceased father, smiling and waving -- but things quickly escalate. In the next photo, Powell poses with Padilla's mother next to a barbecue. She takes a drag off of her hotdog, while Powell throws the family dog, which has two tails and no head, on the grill. "There's probably just too much going on in the picture and the AI got confused," Sherman explains to the distraught grandmother.