The Devil Wears Prada 2 meme that looked like AI was actually hand-painted by a human artist
Devil Wears Prada 2 hit theaters with all the force we expected. Meryl Streep’s return to the iconic role of Miranda Priestley dominated the box office on opening weekend, pulling in 77 million dollars and proving the franchise still has plenty of life left after nearly 20 years. The hype around the movie was massive, with fans revisiting the original, creating content on social media, and dissecting every detail about the cast and production before the film even opened. The sequel to the fictional Runway magazine clearly came to deliver, and audience reception confirmed that right out of the gate.
But in the middle of all that excitement, one small, blink-and-you-miss-it detail on screen grabbed more attention than any dramatic scene in the movie.
A meme lasting just a few seconds, showing Miranda Priestley as a fast-food worker with the phrase Would you like some lies with that?, left audiences split between laughing out loud and a genuine question: was this made by AI or by an actual human being? The scene is part of a sequence in the film that shows various internet memes satirizing editor-in-chief Miranda Priestley, in a context that reflects the satirization of the current state of digital media. The image appears almost discreetly within the narrative, but it had a disproportionate impact on online discussions. In the days following the premiere, forums, comments on X, and reaction videos on YouTube were packed with people debating exactly this point, while the film itself almost took a back seat in those spaces.
The question makes perfect sense nowadays. With AI-powered image generation getting more sophisticated by the day, it has become hard to trust what your eyes are seeing, and the somewhat plastic, artificial look of the meme set off alarm bells for a lot of people on social media. The skin texture, the slightly off lighting, the blurry text on the menu in the background — all of these are characteristics we increasingly associate with images generated by tools like Midjourney, DALL-E, or Stable Diffusion. Illegible text, by the way, has been one of the hallmarks of generative AI, since models have historically struggled to replicate small details like letters and words. And when you see something like that in a big-budget Hollywood production, suspicion is almost automatic.
Except the answer surprised everyone, and in a really positive way. 🎨
The meme was hand-painted by Alexis Franklin
The image was created by Alexis Franklin, a professional artist and illustrator who has been working in the field for nearly a decade. Franklin was hired directly by director David Frankel to produce the digital painting that appears in the film. She used traditional digital painting techniques, building the image layer by layer with virtual brushes, color adjustments, and entirely manual composition. No generative AI tool was used at any stage of the process.
Franklin spoke out publicly after the controversy took over social media. In a post on Instagram, she explained the creative process behind the image and shared a time-lapse showing the painting being built from scratch. The video makes every stage of the work crystal clear, from the first sketches to the final touches on lighting and texture.
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In her own words, she meant no disrespect to queen Meryl, but that type of painting was exactly the kind of thing she would do in her free time, so when the request came in, it was pure fun. The transparency was very well received, and the post racked up hundreds of comments praising both her work and the film’s decision to hire a human artist for the job.
In an interview with NBC News, Franklin revealed that the digital painting took a few days of intermittent work to complete and that she was fairly compensated for the job. She explained via email that she was going for a cheap, plastic look that evoked the aesthetic of photoshopped memes from the 2010s. In other words, the intention was never to imitate AI — it was to replicate that homemade meme vibe that anyone who lived through the internet in that era recognizes instantly.
The artist was not trying to imitate AI
This is an important point that deserves attention. The visual that so many people interpreted as artificial generation was actually a deliberate aesthetic choice with very different references. Franklin made this clear when asked about specific details like the blurry menu text, something many pointed to as proof it was AI content.
According to her, she was technically trying to make the image look artificial, but emulating AI was not on her mind while she was painting. Franklin commented that she feels like the power of suggestion took over the situation. People pointed out common micro-errors in the piece and claimed she did it on purpose to nail the AI slop aesthetic, which she finds amusing.
That observation is particularly revealing. It shows how our collective eye has already been so contaminated by the constant presence of machine-generated images that any visual imperfection is now automatically attributed to artificial intelligence, even when it is simply the natural result of human work. Errors that would have once been read as artistic charm or personal style are now seen as algorithmic glitches. It is a paradigm shift in how we consume and judge visual content. 😅
Even with proof, some still have doubts
Perhaps the most frustrating aspect of this story for Franklin is the fact that, even after sharing the complete time-lapse of her process and having a public portfolio of work that predates the popularization of generative AI by years, some people continue accusing her of having fabricated everything. She reported receiving direct accusations that the Priestley painting was fake, despite all the evidence to the contrary.
For a professional illustrator with nearly ten years of career experience, this kind of skepticism goes beyond personal annoyance. It represents a structural problem that is affecting artists around the world. When the standard of proof required to demonstrate that a piece of work is human becomes practically impossible to meet, something is fundamentally wrong with how society is handling the question of creative authorship.
Why this confusion keeps happening more and more
The difficulty of distinguishing human-created content from AI-generated content is not a weakness in people’s perception. It is a direct reflection of how the tools have evolved at a frighteningly fast pace over the last two or three years. Image generation models like Midjourney are already in advanced versions, with results that rival professional photography in many contexts. And that is not even counting the AI-assisted editing tools that anyone can use today, even without any technical knowledge.
The problem is that this evolution has created a pretty serious side effect: widespread distrust. Media experts have been warning about this growing phenomenon. As generative AI technology becomes more sophisticated, people not only become more likely to believe that AI-generated images are real, but they also become more likely to believe that real images are AI. It is a collapse of trust that goes in both directions.
Franklin reflected on this scenario in her comments to NBC News. According to her, this mass hypervigilance prevails because people do not want to be fooled, which leads them to see signs on the walls that are not really there, or that have very simple and reasonable explanations. And she admits it is hard to know what the solution to this problem would be.
When human artists who work with more experimental, surreal, or deliberately artificial styles start having their work unfairly questioned, we are looking at a curious reversal. For decades, digital artists had to prove their work had value even without paint or a brush. Now they have to prove their work has value because it was not made by a machine. The cycle of legitimization seems to have no end.
A question that goes beyond technique
What makes this story even more significant is the context in which it is happening. We are at a moment when the creative industry is literally at war over the use of AI in content production, especially in Hollywood. When a meme in a major studio production looks like AI and is not, it becomes a symbol of something much bigger than a joke about burgers and lies.
Franklin showed empathy toward the public’s skepticism, especially when it comes from a genuine place of wanting to support human artists. But she also warned that this same skepticism, when unchecked, has the potential to hurt the very artists people are trying to protect.
Her final reflection is perhaps the most powerful takeaway from this entire discussion. Franklin wrote that AI is so prevalent today that people seem to have forgotten how it got so good — it studied us. The techniques AI uses are ours. It is a direct reminder that all the capability of image generation tools exists because they were trained on the work of real human artists, and that confusing the copy with the original is not only unfair but represents an erasure of the very source that fuels this technology.
What this says about today’s audience
There is something very telling about how quickly the audience took to social media to question the authorship of the meme. It shows that the generation consuming content today is genuinely paying attention to questions of authorship and authenticity in a way that probably did not exist five years ago. People were not just watching the movie and moving on. They were pausing, analyzing, discussing, and looking for answers about how that specific piece of content was made. That is, in a way, a sophisticated form of visual literacy that is developing organically and collectively.
On the other hand, it also reveals a growing anxiety around AI that goes far beyond technical debates. When people see an image and the first question is whether it was made by AI, there is an emotional element involved — a real concern about what it means for human work, for human creativity, and for the trust we place in what we see.
One of the comments on Franklin’s Instagram post captures the collective feeling pretty well: someone wrote that it was so refreshing to know it was not AI. Another comment playfully flipped the narrative by saying that instead of AI replacing artists, here were artists replacing AI. These are reactions that show the public is actively rooting for human work to continue having a place and relevance in the creative landscape. 🙂
Regardless of interpretation, the episode shined a light on a conversation the entertainment industry is going to need to have more and more openly with the public. The transparency Alexis Franklin showed by revealing her process was received as something refreshing precisely because it is rare. Big productions rarely explain how visual content is made, and in an era when suspicion of AI use can tarnish the reputation of an entire project, that kind of openness starts to make all the sense in the world. 🎬
At the end of the day, the meme that looked like AI and was not ended up saying more about our current cultural moment than any deep analysis of the film’s screenplay. That is what happens when a small detail touches on something everyone is feeling but cannot always put a name to: the tension between human creativity and automation is everywhere, even in the few seconds of a meme that appears and disappears from the screen before you have time to process what you just saw.
