Nine News publishes AI-altered sexualised image of MP Georgie Purcell
Nine News broadcast a digitally altered image of Victorian MP Georgie Purcell that showed a more revealing outfit and enlarged breasts. The broadcaster apologised and said the change was caused by automation in Adobe Photoshop, while Adobe said any edits would have required human intervention. The image and the responses prompted national and international media coverage and debate about newsroom use of generative image tools.
Photoshop’s generative expand filled missing pixels in a cropped photo with sexualised content and that output passed editorial review into broadcast.
Key facts
- What
- Nine News broadcast a digitally altered image of Victorian MP Georgie Purcell that showed a more revealing outfit and enlarged breasts.
- Incident date
- Jan 29, 2024
- Who
- Nine News (Nine Network)
- Failure mode
- Brand & Safety Incident
- AI surface
- Media Generation
- Severity
- Medium
What happened
Nine News Melbourne aired a graphic that incorporated a digitally altered photo of Victorian Animal Justice Party MP Georgie Purcell which showed a midriff-exposing top and enlarged breasts where she had been wearing a dress. Georgie Purcell posted the altered image to X and criticised the change; Nine News apologised and said the alteration occurred due to "automation by Photoshop" during resizing. The incident was reported by multiple outlets and prompted commentary about newsroom use of generative AI and the need for human oversight.
What broke inside the model
- 01 · TriggerA user prompts the model in public view.
- 02 · Model stepThe model produces unsafe or off-brand output.
- 03 · Control gapNo filter holds the line before publish.
- 04 · FailureThe output goes public unchecked.
- 05 · ConsequenceA reputational or safety incident lands.
A contained signal crosses into output that goes public.
A generative image-editing operation (reported as Adobe Photoshop’s generative fill/expand) produced photo content outside the original cropped image when the image was expanded, producing a sexualised variant of the subject. Editorial controls failed to detect and block the inappropriate output before broadcast, and Adobe stated that the specific edits would have required human intervention. Journalists testing the tool reproduced biased/sexualised outputs when expanding tightly cropped photos, indicating a failure mode in the generative fill behavior combined with inadequate human review in production.
What it cost
Sources
Cite this entry
https://failureindex.ai/failures/nine-news-publishes-altered-sexualised-imageAI Failure Index. "Nine News publishes AI-altered sexualised image of MP Georgie Purcell" (FI-0473). Realm Labs. https://failureindex.ai/failures/nine-news-publishes-altered-sexualised-image (indexed Jun 10, 2026).Data fields CC-BY 4.0, prose citation permitted. Incident ID FI-0473. Full dataset at /data.
Note from Realm Labs, the Index steward
How Realm would have caught this
- Prism
- OmniGuard
- AI Detection & Response (AIDR)
Realm watches the model's internal state for the signature of unsafe or off-brand generation and can block or reroute the output before it becomes public, in real time rather than after it has been screenshotted.