Human artist behind Devil Wears Prada 2 meme mistaken for AI

A meme in The Devil Wears Prada 2 briefly set off the very suspicion it seemed built to provoke: many viewers assumed the image was AI-generated, only to learn it was hand-painted by Alexis Franklin. The picture shows Miranda Priestly, played by Meryl Streep, as a fast-food worker beneath the caption, “Would you like some lies with that?” In a sequel already trafficking in online ridicule, the image became a small test case for how quickly audiences now mistake stylized digital art for machine-made content.

Franklin said the artwork was commissioned by director David Frankel and posted a time-lapse video of her process on Instagram. She said she spent a few days working on the digital painting on and off and was fairly compensated. Her goal was not to mimic artificial intelligence, but to sell the gag with a deliberately off-kilter finish. She described the look as “cheap, plastic” and said it was meant to evoke 2010s meme aesthetics rather than AI.

That distinction mattered because the reaction online was immediate and revealing. NBC News reported that many viewers read the image as AI slop before Franklin disclosed that it had been made by a human artist. Franklin said she was “flooded with comments of relief” that the joke came from “an actual human,” a response that underscores how damaged trust in digital imagery has become. What once might have been read as a specific artistic choice now gets filtered through an algorithmic suspicion.

The moment also arrived with the film back in the spotlight. The sequel opened in theaters on Friday, May 2, 2026, and reunites Streep with Anne Hathaway, Emily Blunt and Stanley Tucci, with Tracie Thoms and Tibor Feldman also reprising their original roles. As the box office conversation spread, so did the art reveal, turning a background visual into a larger debate about authorship, style and how online audiences police the border between human creativity and machine output.

Franklin has framed the work as part joke, part craft, and part reminder of what gets lost when viewers assume every odd-looking image is synthetic. Variety reported that she said the piece was “nothing but fun” and that companies should “get their flowers when they hire an artist.” In an entertainment culture where human-made work can now be praised precisely for resembling AI, this meme became something rare: proof that not every suspicious image is a machine’s creation, and not every visual mess is a failure of judgment.