Daddy's Drunk Again, my bluegrass duet, has a gig booked in my hometown at the beginning of next month. The bar where we'll play has already contacted the local press to announce the concert, and has provided them with a photo they found on our website.

So far, so good. Nothing out of the ordinary.

But the other half of that duet noticed that the picture, as published by some local news sites, had been edited, undoubtedly by some kind of generative AI.

Check it out (original photo on the left, altered one on the right, click on the pictures to get them in full size):

I appreciate how the bot helpfully hid my pinky sticking out (a bad habit of mine that tends to get captured every time someone reaches for a camera). Too bad said pinky looks like it's been cut off as a result. Also, it apparently decided I should be playing an E chord instead of whatever I was doing.

But beyond laughing at the silly details, my main reaction is to ask why ?

I'm not claiming the original picture was perfect, and I'm sure it could use some editing. I honestly don't have an eye for that stuff. But I don't see how the one that got published is any better, even disregarding the various nonsensical modifications that just make it look fake.

I suspect someone (I doubt it was the bar that booked us) simply used an automated editing tool "just in case",¹ without noticing or caring that the tool integrated with some AI that happily hallucinated random changes no one had asked for.

Which makes no sense to me. Using the original file would have been faster than messing with it, and would have looked better.

The other hyposthesis is that no one even did anything, and that some piece of software (an email client, a phone OS, a CMS platform... who knows) automatically decided to "enhance" the picture as it passed through it. I know youtube has done this, and phones have been offering this feature for a while now.

The first option would be disapointing. The second one is terrifying to me.

I guess that's what they mean when they say you can't escape AI. Whether you like it or not, someone is going to force it on you no matter what. And here I am hoping that that someone is at least human.

This particular example is just one out of a billion, but it's the first time it happens to me and I'm split between getting pissed and not even caring.

It's not an embarassing or incrinminating deepfake. It's not conveying false information,² and its reach it gonna stay pretty limited, so it's really not a huge deal. But still.

Had we decided to use AI to edit our stuff, then whether or not that was worth it would be our problem. But we didn't, and now this fake version of us is out there, potentially making us look like AI endorsers (we both stand pretty firmly on the "anti" side of this debate).

All this for no benefit whatsoever to anyone.

I'll contact the website as soon as I'm done ranting here and ask if the file can be replaced, as well as whether the alteration was intentional of not. I don't plan to point my finger or blame anyone for this, as I just don't see what use that would be. But I would like to know when and where that happened, and which of the two hypothesis I mentioned above is right.

We'll see if something comes out of it. I'll edit this post or write a new one if it's of any interest.

Until then, I'll keep bitching to myself about how the web is getting more and more fucked with each passing day.

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Post Scriptum:

So I wanted to link to a specific example of unsollicited AI modifications I remembered reading about some months, maybe a year ago. I went looking for it and gave up after almost two hours of finding nothing but adds pointing to stupid online, AI powered and proud of it editing tools.

Fuck you, internet.

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Edit 2026/17/06:

After investigating for a day, procrastinating for a week, and then taking on the case again yesterday, I now know my first hypothesis was the right one. The bar apologized and admited to using an AI tool to try and make the photo a bit less blurry, and didn't notice the modifications.

I get it. I'm always tempted to automate that kind of routine fixes too, and while I'm sure it would piss off a professional designer, my untrained eyes wouldn't be able to tell the difference. The real problem here is really that the so called "tool" decided on its own to mess with random bits of the picture even though no one ever asked it to.

Tools aren't supposed to act on their own, by the way.

We're talking about a small local business that probably has a million other things to do here, and the scale is pretty small. So all in all this particular story is not a huge deal.

But seeing the rest of the world being more and more okay to rely on those things for anything more serious is just crazy to me.

Anyway. Problem solved ?

Not quite.

The picture was submitted to a "local events" site hosted by a regional newspaper, which is sourced by various institutional sites. The former was updated this morning. The latter aren't as I'm writing this.

Maybe I just have to wait a bit and the data will update on its own. Or maybe someone needs to trigger a manual refresh. I have no idea.

I'll wait for a few days and see if I need to ask for that refresh or not.

Sigh.