One of the huge joys of Saturday Night Live over the last 50 years has been the extraordinary level of craft that goes into every episode. The sketches might often suck, but the sets, costumes and make-up will be incredible, despite the long-experienced crew often having less than 24 hours notice of what needs to be prepared. It’s been a stunning achievement for five decades, which makes this week’s episode’s extensive use of AI slop an extraordinary letdown.
From the opening moment of the Josh O’Connor-hosted episode, it looked like AI art was being used in place of the usually superb creations of the long-running show’s incredible prop and design team. A storybook with a poem loosely in the style of The Night Before Christmas, leading up to a cold-open with Trump giving interviews on Air Force One, was illustrated with artwork that looked incredibly likely to be AI-generated. While not egregiously bad, little details appear to give the game away, like the suddenly broken path in a picture of a snowy village:
And this girl’s frighteningly thin leg and then entirely missing second foot:
Plus it all just has that look, that sheen that rings hollow. As soon as it appeared on screen it looked off to me, and I remember thinking how disappointing it is to see a real artist denied the chance to draw something lovely for the show.
Things became more egregious during Weekend Update, where the usually amusingly poor Photoshops and stock images that appear over Colin Jost and Michael Che’s shoulders were replaced with extremely suss slop. A gag about a horse on a plane received this image that—in fairness—looks like the usual amusingly slapdash Photoshopping, until you look a bit closer at details like the foreheads of the people in the rows behind. And then what might be an attempt to remove the horse’s genitals, but it’s damned weird.
More obvious was the image of a woman on O2 at a slot machine, seen at the top of this post. The hose doesn’t actually touch the O2 canister, the slot machine is weirdly shaped, and the lights and buttons are all irregular shapes.
Alongside these, there was an almost certainly AI-generated image of a man taking off an Elsa costume, and the most horrifically poor rotating head of Kristi Noem in a joke based on The Exorcist. It all gave the usually fun segment of SNL a grim edge.
People on social media were quickly to call out the apparent AI, disappointed that a program known for its creativity would sink to smothering itself in AI slop. It presumably makes sense when a show is put together from start to finish in six days, with cold-opens and Weekend Update usually written in the final 24 hours before live broadcast, to try to find ways to speed up production, but cutting corners and replacing creative work with this kind of dross isn’t it.
A lot of reasons why SNL using AI for stuff like this sucks, but my main gripe is just that it’s less funny! The intentionally kind of janky photoshops are part of the joke and beat the weird smooth AI aesthetic. pic.twitter.com/ZBBoXQSgUS
— Josh Billinson (@jbillinson) December 14, 2025
It was more of a shame given that this was, overall, a decent episode of the hit-and-miss show. Lily Allen was a great musical guest, and appeared in a fun and silly sketch spoofing her own on-the-nose lyrics, Bowen Yang reprised one of his creepiest characters, and this sketch of the most sensitive bachelorette strippers was the funniest of the night:
Plus Jane Wickline did another of her adorable Weekend Update songs, this time about the greatest threat to the survival of humanity:
Yeah, most of the show’s sketches are overlong duds, and sure, you stopped watching years ago, but SNL remains a crucial fixture in comedy, still creating viral sketches and beginning the careers of many of the best comedians. It also boasts one of the most talented behind-the-scenes crews in television, and to see their talents eschewed for AI slop is devastating. SNL, don’t do that; be better.