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My CNN colleague and I spent the last week trying to figure out what was going on with the Freedom250 portrait gallery which features a bunch of founding fathers striking LinkedIn CEO poses. We figured they were AI-generated but no one from the org would confirm it so we sent the images to our photo team to take a look. They analyzed the portraits and found that all of them bore a SynthID watermark which Google appends to images created using their AI software.
That explained the uncanny airbrushed quality of the portraits, but we also wanted to figure out why there were a new set of images portraying different historical figures that often looked nothing like the contemporaneous images we have of them. In addition to pictures of Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, there are also yassified images of Abigail Adams and Phyllis Wheatley. (Oddly, the portraits of women didn't have a SynthID mark but did trigger other AI analysis software.) The resulting piece dove into the political power of government-affiliated art, and what message Freedom250 is trying to relay about the founding story of America.
