Curious cover photo in the newspaper Sport Alexia Putellas's image. It was an Efe image, in horizontal format, which made it impossible to fit on a front page of vertical paper. But when big problems come, big solutions are needed: everything points to someone using artificial intelligence to create the missing piece of the player's body underneath to adapt the image to the space. Of course, the generative algorithms have done their thing—like when they sometimes place six misshapen fingers on people—and beneath the player's crest are some illegible, ghostly letters that were meant to say "Spain" but have ended up being an illegible Dalí-esque scribble, like those captches who, on the internet, try to discern whether we are human or robots. In any case, if Abascal and the other apostles of the Sullied Spain see this mess, we're guaranteed a cider festival.
The issue raises the question of whether it's an acceptable practice. Purists will remember that the photographer took the image with a specific frame and that the integrity of the work must be respected, but the truth is that in the media, their prints are often cropped to fit into the holes determined by the model. Is it substantially worse to invent a piece of a photo? Be that as it may, it amounts to creating a nonexistent reality without telling the reader, and that truly breaks an essential implicit contract. Nearly twenty years ago, the newspaper already featured a controversial front page showing a photograph of Eto'o, Henry, Messi, and Ronaldinho together for the first time at Barça. In reality, Oleguer also appeared in the image, but someone removed him with Photoshop. Doing this in the sports press doesn't have the implications of when Stalin erased Trotsky from photos of him with Lenin, but taking these liberties is a dangerous path, one that ends up erasing people or adding bodies for purely aesthetic reasons.
