Have you seen those photos of basketball legend LeBron James dressed in pink, supposedly going to see the new Barbie movie? They’ve gone viral this week, with people sharing the images on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. But they’re completely fake.
The images, which are often captioned with things like “LeBron James on the Barbie movie” sometimes also have accessories like a pink purse. One of the images also shows James wearing a pink skirt, though the color is off just enough to possibly qualify as beige.
But subtleties of color aside, they images are fake and were created using artificial intelligence tools like MidJourney or DALL-E. It’s not immediately clear what AI tool was used to make the fake James photos that are currently circulation on social media.
One of the fake images has over 260,000 views on Facebook alone and even drew the attention of Politifact, the political fact-checking organization. Politifact notes that the fingers in some of the fake photos of James are way out of proportion—even “alien-like.” AI tech still struggles with creating fingers in a realistic way, something that we see time and time again whenever fake images go viral.
The new film, directed by Greta Gerwig and starring Margot Robbie along with Ryan Gosling, is both a critical examination of Barbie’s history and a celebration of the beloved toy. The movie has so far raked in over $200 million in an impressive box office win for Warner Bros.
And while it may seem “obvious” to those of us here in the 2020s that certain colors represent different genders, that wasn’t always the case. In fact, I recently wrote about the history of the colors blue and pink for babies. Believe it or not, pink was most commonly given to baby boys before the 1940s and blue was associated with girls during that era. This color association was even seen as “natural” in the first few decades of the 20th century.
But whatever you think of Barbie, gendered colors or anything else currently being debated in the culture wars, just know that those images of LeBron James are fake.
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