Anyone familiar with the Free Press, and its institutional project of dehumanizing Arabs, would have known that Abdul El-Sayed's U.S. Senate election win was going to have a bad effect on some of its employees. Indeed, staff writer Olivia Reingold and reporter Maya Sulkin are currently competing to see who can crash out the hardest. Whereas Sulkin has taken the obvious route of recording herself quivering in fear at the sound of El-Sayed's name and his use of a few Arabic words, Reingold opted for something more perplexing: using artificial intelligence to produce an uncanny image of a woman's feet.
"So far at Abdul El-Sayed’s election night event I’ve spotted, Valentino heels, a Chanel bag, a Moncler jacket, Rolex watches, and a YSL bag among other designer items," Reingold wrote on Tuesday night. She attached this photo to her message:
You don't have to look at that photo too long to realize it's all fucked up. The shading and proportions are a mess, the straps on the shoes are riddled with extraneous eyelets, and the shadows don't really line up. Vanity Fair style correspondent José Criales-Unzueta pointed out the photo's odd features in an article published Wednesday, and cited an AI detector's conclusion that the photo was AI-generated.
On Thursday, Reingold responded by admitting that she had used ChatGPT to "brighten and sharpen an image of a woman in Valentino shoes and a Chanel bag," and shared her original photo:
Hello my name is Olivia Reingold and I used ChatGPT to brighten and sharpen an image of a woman in Valentino shoes and a Chanel bag.
— Olivia Reingold (@Olivia_Reingold) November 5, 2026
After processing, it still shows these same things: a woman wearing Valentino shoes and a Chanel bag.
She is a real (and chic!) woman, really… pic.twitter.com/156DplaT83
I reached out to Free Press deputy editor Oliver Wiseman to ask if the outlet has a policy regarding the use of AI images, but have not yet heard back.
So what did we learn here? Not a lot, other than the fact that Olivia Reingold is somehow unaware of the fact that every smartphone has built-in photo editing features that make it very simple to brighten and sharpen photos, without the use of AI. It is fun, however, to imagine Reingold standing in a crowd of jubilant El-Sayed supporters, taking a photo of a stranger's feet, uploading the photo to ChatGPT, typing "please brighten and sharpen this image," downloading the obviously fucked-up result, then proudly posting it to her Twitter feed in order to make a totally impenetrable observation. That's a hell of way to spend one of the worst nights of your life, and exactly the sort of dogged journalism that made the Free Press worth $150 million.
