Politician Denies Using AI to Enhance Official Candidate Photo

A politician in the Netherlands who won a council seat in a local election has denied that her publicity photograph was AI-generated.

The photo that appeared in a local newspaper of 59-year-old Patricia Reichman looks very different from what Reichman actually looks like. In the official candidate photo that she personally provided, she looks much younger and has different features.

Reichman has denied using AI, instead telling Dutch newspaper Algemeen Dagblad (AD) that she used unspecified software to boost the resolution.

“The photo in the neighborhood paper was of too low a resolution, so I ran it through an online tool to boost the pixel count,” Reichman says. “It really is my photo; that really is me. I look a bit different at the moment, but that is due to medication I’m taking. That will be ending soon.”

Reichman won a seat to represent a neighborhood in the city of Rotterdam. While she concedes that the questionable image does make her look much younger, she insists that her age belies her appearance.

“When I’m out and about with my son, people often assume I’m his girlfriend,” she tells AD. “I hear it all the time, that I look remarkably young for my age.”

People reports that the controversy took yet another turn when the local newspaper, AD, discovered that Reichman doesn’t even live in the neighborhood that elected her. Reichman insists she does live there but has two residences.

The party she stood for, Leefbaar Rotterdam, which translates to Livable Rotterdam, issued a statement announcing she is being expelled from the party.

“The photo has clearly been heavily edited with AI and is not a realistic representation,” the statement reads. “We wish to emphasize that this edited photo was not used in campaign materials by Leefbaar Rotterdam or in publications by the Municipality of Rotterdam. They sent this photo exclusively to the neighborhood newspaper — in a personal capacity.”

Leefbaar Rotterdam adds that it requested Reichman relinquish her seat, but she has refused, and it therefore has no choice but to expel her.

“When the information provided during the job interview proves not to correspond with reality, there is no basis of trust to continue working together,” the statement concludes.

Despite Reichman’s protestations, it does seem clear that she used an AI image generator tool; she likely fed it a photo of herself. But when AI users do that, the model treats the source photo the same as a text prompt, and will proceed to create a novel image that often has biased results — frequently making users look younger and more beautiful.