Manchester Airport pulls AI-generated photography billboard after online mockery

A bag labeled “Kobak Pomtoe” was all it took to expose Manchester Airport’s photography billboard as a botched AI job. The campaign, which ran in Terminal 3, was mocked online for distorted hands, garbled text and camera details that looked half-finished at best, a reminder that a quick glance is no substitute for a real art director.

Thom Rylance of The Lottery Winners was among the first to call it out, posting a tongue-in-cheek video on the band’s social channels and pointing to the obvious visual mistakes. Rylance, whose own website describes him as a songwriter, producer, presenter and photographer, framed the ad as a basic failure of judgment: if an airport wants to sell photography, why use imagery that collapses the moment anyone with a working eye looks closely?

The wording on the billboard did not help. The ad copy read, “There’s over 200 reasons to fly from Manchester Airport,” but the execution undercut the message the second the fake people and fake gear entered frame. That disconnect is exactly why the story spread so fast. Photographers are trained to notice anatomy, branding, lens shape, straps, hands, reflections and the small tactile details that make a scene believable. This campaign missed on nearly all of them.

Manchester Airport said it was already aware of the issue and planned to remove the billboard. That response turned a social-media joke into a straightforward case study in the risks of pushing generative imagery into public-facing work without enough human review. It also shows how far some brands are willing to stretch AI production in place of casting, location work, retouching and the simple discipline of using a real photographer who knows how objects actually sit in a frame.

The irony is that Manchester Airport is hardly short on actual visual ambition. Its newsroom says Terminal 2 is in the middle of a major transformation, and Manchester Evening News reported in March 2025 that six new shops and eateries opened there as part of a £1.3 billion redevelopment plan. For a brand already investing heavily in presentation, the AI billboard was a strange own goal. It looked cheap, it looked fake, and it made the airport’s attempt at a photography message feel like exactly the kind of image-making photographers have been warning clients about for months.