Republican mocked for sharing deeply bizarre, ‘yassified’ AI photo of JD Vance
JD Vance during the vice presidential debate in 2024. (Getty)
Georgia Republican Mike Collins has become something of a laughing stock after sharing a photo online of Trump’s running mate in the presidential election, JD Vance, that had clearly been enhanced.
The photo, which Collins shared on Wednesday (2 October), while wishing everyone a “gm” [good morning], had been modified to make Vance’s cheekbones more prominent, his brow ridge more defined, and his jawline sharper. His nose appears to have also been changed and his skin is slightly more tanned.
Several users were quick to point out the modifications to the photo, which was posted shortly after Vance’s debate with his Democratic rival Tim Walz, sharing side-by-side comparisons with an unedited photo.
“Rep. Mike Collins, a sitting member of congress, either digitally altered an official photo of JD Vance or posted a photo he knew was digitally altered,” writer and activist Charlotte Clymer claimed in a post. “Good lord, these people are so weird.”
Social media users took the chance to alter Vance’s face even further as a joke. Some chiselled his jaw to cartoonish proportions, while others used AI tools to gender-swap him or shrink his facial features.
One user, who ended up attracting more than 230,000 likes, said he would edit Vance’s face to look like a “progressively apple-cheeked baby” for every 100 he received. The end result, which the user stopped at 18 different edits, is unusual, to say the least.
Other people described the picture as “yassified”, which basically means an over the top makeover, usually made by applying extreme AI-based beauty filters to an existing picture.
During the televised vice-presidential debate, Vance was criticised for appearing to dodge a question about Donald Trump’s lie that he won the 2020 election. The conspiracy theory resulted in the 6 January insurrection, during which thousands of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol building in Washington DC.
“To deny what happened on January 6, the first time an American president or anyone tried to overturn an election, this has got to stop,” Walz said. “It’s tearing our country apart.”
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