The Onion Just Deleted Another Image After Realizing It Was AI Slop

Days after The Onion was forced to take down an article's image after realizing it was AI slop, the satirical news site has been forced to do it again.

After being somewhat hilariously called out, the newspaper's CEO Ben Collins was all apologies on Bluesky when admitting that the latest article — titled "Panicked Pottery Barn Executives Announce They Have Lost Control Of The Wicker" and featuring an image of the Manhattan skyline replaced with the woven material — had been up for a while.

"Goddammit," wrote the former NBC News extremism reporter and social star. "The Onion once again posted an article in which a portion of the artwork came from an AI-generated Shutterstock image."

"This article was over a month old and only a portion of the image," wrote the former NBC News extremism reporter and social star. "We took it down immediately. We'll be more vigilant. I'm personally sorry and I'm working on it."

It's a striking pair of incidents — not because The Onion is trying to pull a fast one on its workers or readers, but because it illustrates just how deeply AI content has already permeated the media ecosystem, working its way into the efforts even of creatives explicitly trying to avoid it.

"This was a months-old image, and Shutterstock's 'exclude AI' thing seems to have some known problems," Collins continued. "I'm reevaluating options here to make sure this doesn't happen again."

We weren't able to find the image in question on Shutterstock, though it was archived by our Slack instance before The Onion pulled it down.

Google Image Search, however, turned up something that Collins didn't mention: the image had been featured next to the aforementioned Pottery Barn article in The Onion's first print issue after the reboot, which was also the first time it was printed in over a decade.

That reverse image search directed us to the Substack blog The Onion: 20 Years Later. In it, writer and allium enthusiast James daSilva reviews old Onion issues — though on the occasion of the first print issue since 2013, which was sent to paying subscribers last November, he went more modern as he lauded the paper's return.

Strikingly, daSilva also questioned whether the image was generated with AI before ultimately dismissing it as "merely a great use of Photoshop or similar tools to transform a stock photo."

As with the last time this happened, it does seem very much like The Onion made an honest mistake when altering stock art for comedic effect. But now stock photo sites, like Shutterstock as well as those operated by Getty Images and Adobe, include AI image generators for search queries — and as Collins noted in his Bluesky thread, the "exclude AI" option doesn't always work.

At the end of his apologia thread, Collins noted that The Onion's art team sometimes works with stock photo sites — as do most publishers that work with conceptual illustrations, including Futurism.

"This was not a problem until stock photo services became flooded with AI slop," he wrote. "We'll reinforce process and move on."

Despite this debacle occurring for the second time in less than a week, it does appear that this latest instance of AI slop at The Onion actually occurred before the first, given that this one was seemingly published back in November and the one from last week was more recent.

Reading between the lines there, it does seem like the satire paper is, at the very least, looking to be transparent about the removal of any AI-generated images from its latest iteration — a laudable effort in such a sloppy age.

More on AI slop: Behold the AI Slop Dominating Google Image Results for "Does Corn Get Digested"