Senator Dick Durbin Falls For AI-Generated Photo of Alex Pretti
AI giveth and AI taketh away
The teary celebrities and caterwauling that “fascism is here” are the norm on the Left now. Common sense flew out the window long ago. But even still, you’d think Senator Dick Durbin, of all people, would have been a little more careful in displaying this photo of Alex Pretti supposedly being shot, leading weak-minded Democrats to conclude the operation and likely birthed a thousand blue-haired, septum-pierced fanatics in real time.
This is a great depiction of what Democrats saw in that video because they see ICE agents as Nazis and fascists. No one helps snap them out of it or explains that if they were indeed Nazis or fascists, these celebrities would be shot on the street or in jail just for saying so. One only needs to look at what is happening in Iran to understand that.
And here is the video:
I’ve heard people compare it to the famous assassination photo by Eddie Adams that, according to the New York Times, “changed the course of the Vietnam War.”
That photo is real, obviously. There was no AI back then. But what if you could manipulate the video of Alex Pretti’s death to make it look like that? Would that become the photo that changed the course of the Left’s war on ICE and law enforcement? They were hoping it would, or at least, whoever did it was hoping for the maximum amount of chaos.
Even Reuters did fact-check and clear up the false image, but that news did not travel fast enough.
With AI images everywhere, I now rely on a different AI to set the record straight. They’re much faster, although by the time I saw that Dick Durbin had used it in the Senate, it had already been corrected by legitimate sources, which then gives AI the necessary information. I asked whether the image was AI-generated:
Yes, the photo shown by Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) in the image you provided is an AI-generated (or AI-manipulated) fake. This incident occurred in late January 2026, during a Senate floor speech where Durbin condemned the fatal shooting of Alex Pretti (a 37-year-old ICU nurse and VA hospital employee) by federal Border Patrol agents in Minneapolis on January 24, 2026. The event stemmed from protests against immigration enforcement actions under the Trump administration, not the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot (Pretti had no connection to that event).Durbin displayed a large printed photo purporting to show the moment just before Pretti was shot: him on the ground, an agent pointing a gun at or near his head, and others restraining him. He described it as showing Pretti holding a camera (not a gun) in his right hand, with his left on the ground, emphasizing no visible resistance or weapon.However, multiple fact-checks and reports confirm the image is manipulated using AI:
It contains clear artifacts, such as one of the kneeling federal agents appearing headless (a common AI generation flaw where parts of the image fail to render properly).
Verified bystander videos and analyses (from sources like Reuters, CNN, PolitiFact, and others) show the real scene: Pretti was holding a phone (not a gun) while trying to assist someone, was taken down, and an agent removed a holstered handgun from him before shots were fired. No authentic still matches the dramatic “gun to head execution-style” pose in Durbin’s display.
The image circulated virally on social media as an altered version of real footage, with inconsistencies flagging it as AI-edited.
Though never 100% accurate, because even AIs can make mistakes, Grok searched the web within seconds to help me understand whether that image was real or not.
And if all of that wasn’t enough, there was an AI-generated picture of Pretti looking more “pretty,” that circulated and was seen on some major news outlets.
I am working on a longer piece about AI, but I thought this was an important enough story to bring to you, that a senator would legitimize a fake AI photo that was used as pure propaganda.
Back in 2020, in the immediate aftermath of the death of George Floyd, a fake image circulated that supposedly showed Derek Chauvin with a red hat that said “Make America White Again” on it. It was posted by Ice Cube and whipped around the internet and was seen by millions before that lie was corrected. The tweet exists even now.
Once again, the AP printed that it was a hoax, but I promise you, plenty still believe that it was true, and that likely led to many thinking Chauvin murdered George Floyd as an act of racial hatred.
Although today, I expect it would have more likes and RTs because things are so much worse now than they were even then. Our Civil War is raging because the Democrats could not take Trump out of power and lost to him again in 2024. They haven’t learned a thing.
The Democrats, in my view, are magical thinkers who will fall for anything and thus are more susceptible than MAGA, who tend to question everything and think everything is a hoax.
The MAGA meme machine remains undefeated. They were able to turn Senator Elizabeth Warren’s somber speech on Alex Pretti into street art now circulating on X. The follow-up video showing an angry and unhinged Pretti breaking a taillight emerged within days after the shooting, though Democrats do not wait. They never let a crisis go to waste.
Senator Durbin has “fast-tracked” legislation on AI and deep fakes so it’s all the more ironic and dangerous that he himself would fall for it without double-checking or that he would ever think ICE agents would be that brutal.
We have ICE agents all over Florida grabbing criminal illegal aliens with no interference from protesters. They get in and get out. It helps that they are supported by local police. It’s possible for ICE to do its job when citizens want criminals off the street. Minneapolis just wants the grift to continue. I don’t feel sorry for them because they created the chaos.
Nguyen Ngoc Loan was a South Vietnamese general. The man shot was a Vietcong member, not wearing a uniform in violation of the Geneva Conventions. Battle field execution was warranted. It was not a war crime, but was presented as such by US media. Still misunderstood incident to this day.