A lawmaker from the Australian state of Victoria sat watching the evening news on Monday, hoping to be featured as a prominent opponent of duck hunting.
However, MP Georgie Purcell noticed that her stomach tattoo was missing in one of the photos used by 9News.
“I saw the image on the screen and I thought, 'That's really weird,' because I have a full tattoo on my stomach,” Purcell said Wednesday.
When she compared the image to the original photo taken by a local newspaper last year, she noticed that not only had the tattoo been removed, but the dress had become a crop top and skirt. “They gave me chiseled abs and a boob job,” she said. “I felt really, really uncomfortable about it.”
After Purcell called out the changes on social media site X, female MPs and journalists labeled the edits as sexist and objectifying.
News outlet 9News apologized to Purcell. In a statement, the company called the change a “graphical error” and blamed it on a Photoshop automation tool.
A statement from Hugh Nylon, news director in Melbourne, Victoria, said the outlet's graphics department used an online photo of Ms Purcell in the article. When resizing the photo to fit the news package's specifications, “Photoshop automation created an image that did not match the original,” the statement said.
Ms Purcell questioned the suggestion that there was no human element to the situation. A representative from Adobe, which owns Photoshop, said editing the image “would have required human intervention and approval.”
Nine, which owns 9News, did not respond to an emailed request for clarification. The Sydney Morning Herald, also owned by Nine, reported that the company said it had “confirmed that there was human intervention in the decision to use the image”.
Some commentators familiar with Photoshop say that if the problem was with artificial intelligence, the fix was made using a Photoshop tool that fills the blank space above and below the image with automatically generated continuations of the image. Some suggest it is possible. Professor Rob Nicholls from the University of Technology Sydney and his colleagues said the changes may have been made using automatic correction features, such as selfie filters that modify facial features.
The broadcast of the image, which appeared to be without anyone checking to see if it was an accurate depiction of Ms Purcell, meant that “using AI without strong editorial controls risks making very serious mistakes”. He said that it shows that.
The incident shows that AI can reproduce existing biases, he added. “I don't think it's a coincidence that these issues tend to be gendered.”
Ms Purcell said similar edits to images of other female MPs would not have been allowed to air, but her case was allowed to air because of her background. “I'm young, blonde, heavily tattooed, and have a history of sex work,” she said. “At least it started a very important conversation about the mistreatment of women in public life.”