The Valentine’s season is always a great time to share one’s love and deep appreciation for their romantic partner, unless you’re Meghan Markle. Of course, the As Ever CEO deserves the right, as any other married woman, to be proud of her husband and praise him for what he is to her. However, the wife of Prince Harry used rather a questionable practice to promote her love for Valentine’s Day, via a fake and staged photo.
Posting a photo to her Instagram account, Meghan Markle shared a video of Prince Harry carrying Lillibet, who is holding some balloons. At first, there’s nothing too notable about the picture, besides the controversial opinion that critics have about Meghan using her children as promotional material for her brand. However, a shrewd Instagram user under the account linked_not_ranked pointed out that the bottom left balloon is mysteriously missing its string, proof that the picture is allegedly fake, edited, or altered with AI. Yet, that was not the only reason people found reason to criticize the Duchess of Sussex for this photo.
“Nobody ties balloons to a child if they were already holding them naturally in an actually authentic moment, this is so clearly STAGED,” exclaims a Redditor, putting close attention to Lilibet’s hand. “Not just staged, it appears to be blatantly and (very) badly faked,” added another commenter. “I guess even AI cannot help at this level of stupid.” A third assumed that this photo was uploaded as a distraction from the media mentioning Prince Harry and Meghan Markle in the Epstein Files, which is a bit of a stretch, honestly.
One person claiming to be a balloon business owner had strong evidence that Meghan had used AI to edit the picture before uploading it: “There’s no way that all those balloons would be facing upright outside in even a modicum of wind, it’s AI for that fact alone.” On the other hand, several people came out defending Meghan with claims that the so-called ‘missing string’ is visible in the picture; it’s just been blurred and blended into the background.
Of course, the defenders are a small minority, whereas the grand majority strongly believes Prince Harry’s wife used AI to edit her photo. In the end, it’s more likely than naught that something is definitely off about the Instagram photo, regardless of whether it’s AI or not. This wouldn’t be the first time she has fabricated a fake story or attempted to weave a false narrative into some media coverage. But the main issue still remains of her using one of her children as brand promotion, even though it’s against her husband’s wishes to do so.
