The chief executive of a Michigan bank has lost her job after facing backlash for a social media photo of her family in sweatshirts that read “Lake America,” referencing Donald Trump’s relabeling of Lake Ontario.
Jane Smith from Family First Credit Union recently went viral after sharing the photo of her and three relatives wearing navy blue crewnecks with the words “Lake America” scrawled in white. The picture was snapped as her family left on September 11 for a 10-day trip to Halifax, Nova Scotia, but Smith says the sweatshirts were edited onto their bodies using AI.
“We weren’t trying to make a political statement,” Smith told Michigan outlet WJRT. “However, we were kind of poking fun at the fact that one of the Great Lakes’ names were getting changed.”
Family First Credit Union announced Wednesday that Smith was no longer with the company and that Jason Acosta, the chief operations officer, would serve as interim CEO.
For those who want to see the image without allowing 20 javascripts to run:
Possibly pattern-seeking behavior but if you squint, those waves look an awful lot like the nazi eagle, which just adds to this whole thing
Yeah that’s a huge reach. I don’t think the AI image thing would do that without specific prompting.
Do we know what the prompt said and that it didn’t include that?
No but my guess is it was “put us in lake america sweatshirts” or something. “Put us in lake america sweatshirts with little squiggles that look vaguely like a Nazi eagle if you squint and tilt your head just right” seems unlikely. If they wanted Nazi imagery they would have just put it right there, because openly being a Nazi is acceptable now, apparently.
Whatever model they used is unlikely to associate “lake america” and “Nazi eagle graphic”, so I doubt the AI would have done this silently. (Maybe if it was grok. Elon has his thumb on that scale.)
Come on. What are the chances AI got all of that text and logos correct? $100 says those are real shirts.