Call it a cautionary tale? The Alpine Avalanche editor was surprised to hear that her Friday Facebook post outlining the proceedings of the June 25 Marfa City Council meeting somehow included a photo of council members with altered appearances.
When you looked at the line of officials in that photo — now deleted — saying the Pledge of Allegiance, something was off on all of them. Their faces didn’t look quite right. Councilmember Katy Kowal noticed it and commented on the post the day after it came out on July 3: “Please remove this photo at your earliest convenience,” she wrote. “The entire image is doctored, including my face. I do not wear glasses nor do I own them.” It appears something also outfitted Councilmember Travis Acreman with glasses as well, and for Councilmember Raul Lara, well, he was replaced with some unknown guy that looked only slightly like him.
A link under the Alpine Avalanche name on the post provided by Facebook, “AI info,” gave an obvious clue. This was an AI photo. “This is a really weird thing to post,” another Facebook commenter said. “Why attend the meeting and then post this bizarre AI photo of the City Council. This is literally not their face.”
Contacted Monday morning, Avalanche Editor Kara Gerbert said it was a mistake made by moving too quickly while working with a bad photo taken from the Zoom video of the meeting.
“[My publisher] had taken a photo of the Zoom video, and it was super blurry and horrible, and you couldn’t tell anything from it,” she said. “So I dropped it into AI … so it would clear focus. When it came back, I didn’t catch that it put glasses on Katy.”
The mistake led to a bit of mayhem as the post survived a holiday weekend and viewers questioned why someone would post an obviously false photo. The photo made the print paper too, but Gerbert said it was so small that no one caught its irregularities before going to press.
Councilmember Emily Kolb said she took the mistake seriously. “I think that it’s entirely inappropriate,” she said. “I think it’s lazy. I think it’s embarrassing.”
A mistake in Gerbert’s story about an agenda item led to speculation that AI had written her story. But she said she never uses AI for writing. It was a minor mistake that she plans to address at the next council meeting along with a mea culpa for the photo edit.
Kolb said she’s “a little beside myself” with so many people immersed in using AI. “They’re utilizing it in their jobs, in their flyers, and in their journalism, and it’s making me feel crazy,” she said.
Editor’s note: For the record, Big Bend Sentinel reporters and editors do not use AI for writing.
