US senator Mitch McConnell on Sunday revealed for the first time that a fall led to his hospitalization, breaking the silence about the Kentucky Republican’s condition after weeks of mounting speculation about his health.
The statement included a smiling picture of McConnell with his wife, Elaine Chao, a tacit response to speculation online that he had died or was incapacitated. McConnell held a copy of Sunday’s Washington Post sports section in his hand.
Look at the headline text. It’s gibberish.
Compare the text to the level of detail on the player’s face. Compare it to the level of clarity of the lines on his shirt.
The third line of text on the headline is the worst. Not even close to the correct words.
The corner of the player photo is curved too. Since when do news papers print that way? That’s also suspicious, but not a definitive tell.
There are four lines of text in the headline: One word, two words, three words, one word. That’s reflected perfectly accurately in the McConnell photo. You can even see the hypen-capital-C in “-Czech.”
Digital cameras fib about their pixel counts, and they cannot, by nature, resolve anything accurately at the level of individual output pixels. The photo from the paper looks better because it’s in color, and the output of digital imaging sensors gets up-scaled in color, under the assumption that the image they’re resolving is in color.
We’ve entered an age where it’s not remotely crazy to be skeptical about the provenance of images like this, I can’t blame you for your suspicion. But I don’t think it’s fake.
The words in the headline have the right outline and position. The paper looks exactly as pixelated as his shirt. The corner of the photo looks diagonal because that’s where the paper is folded. I don’t see evidence of fakery in any of these things.
There could be AI face replacement going on but there’s no evidence for that either. The photo is not a great way to prove life when the Internet’s full of high quality fake images and videos, but it doesn’t look especially suspicious either.
I think you should learn how phone cameras work
Upvoted. I’m not sure I agree with you yet because of the perfect plaid in his shirt and the lack of obvious fault in the pixelization throughout, but I absolutely respect the receipts you brought.
Also, his wife is smiling. I’m not absolutely sure it’s because he’s alive, but okay.
If he was dead, what they would do is get someone else in a photo like this and edit the head with AI to that of Mitch McConnell. The rest of the photo can be genuine and exhibit no signs of AI editing, and AI could probably simulate just his face realistically enough to be believable.
On that note, one of the most unbelievable things is that he’s smiling, which he truly does not do.
So I would guess 1 of 2 things: either that is not Mitch McConnell we are seeing, or that is him and he is suffering some pretty severe brain damage.
As much as I want to jump on the “he’s dead” bandwagon, I am more inclined to believe the latter just because it seems more believable and that’s the impression I get from this photo. Just the expression on his face and how meekly he is holding the newspaper there lead me to think that he’s really not all there anymore. But the Republicans wouldn’t want that bit of information to come to light either, as he would still be considered “incapacitated” and unfit for office, so they probably still want to keep anyone from speaking with him. The longer they can keep up the charade, they can just have someone else essentially vote for him like the Dems did for Dianne Feinstein before she died.
Could also just prop his corpse up into position, with limbs held up by wires. A talented makeup artist/mortician could easily make his face look alive for one still photo.
Possibly, but that sounds like way more effort than simply using digital tools to achieve the same outcome.
Good comment. To support your theory of injury to the brain, look carefully at the photo. (If you’re on desktop you can click on it to get a better view.) In my own layman’s opinion, his pupils do not seem to be well aligned, and there may be some ptosis that the direction of his gaze is minimizing.
They could be aligned and I’m just looking at it wrong, but a direct facing look would have gone a lot further to prove sentience, IMO.
There’s a lot of very small details that AI would have messed up. Like the background stuff in the picture seems to match okay. But AI is getting better, or they could have had a good photoshop expert. The lettering is due to the camera resolution, I don’t see anything off in word placement or length anywhere.
If it’s fake, then they’ll flub up soon enough somewhere else in continuing it.
Physical newspapers use shitty font/dpi, part of why it’s huge.
It’s weird he’s grasping like that, but that’s the important bit. It’s an instinctual grasping response even infants have, and people only grab everything in reach when their higher facilities are compromised.
For the last year he’s been freezing in public, long before this “fall”, his brain is shutting down and accumulating damage
The photo isn’t curved. Thats the indentation from where he’s gripping it.
I’m not talking about the physical paper.
The corner of the photo looked rounded because the paper bends due to him grabbing it
Yeah, they took this photo months ago, and planned on photoshopping in any paper they needed. Kentucky GOP has been preparing for this eventuality.
EDIT: looks like he’s missing some fingernails
Those are his knuckles maybe
Ok, that makes sense. The grasp is weird. Like shoving a paper into a dead man’s hand.
It’s a grasping response…
One of the things they check new orns for, shove something near a baby and they grab it. The hand is a sign that his brain is done cooking, his eyes may be open, but there’s no higher function going on. And he’s probably juiced to the gills to get this picture
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Why is that baseball player Homer Simpson yellow?
No, he’s blue and black
Hah