Miranda Priestly, dressed for a shift in fast food, is exactly the sort of image the internet would manufacture during a scandal. In The Devil Wears Prada 2, that is the joke. The unexpected sequel to the joke was people assuming a generator had made it.
The artist was Alexis Franklin. She shared her digital painting process and explained that director David Frankel had commissioned the image. A human made the deliberately unflattering meme. Somewhere, a perfectly serviceable outrage cycle had to stop and check its paperwork.
The Artist Behind the Gag
Franklin’s May 2 post described the relieved responses to her earlier Instagram upload and credited the production for hiring an artist. The artwork and a time-lapse made the person behind the brief on-screen joke visible.
That matters because the image was circulating as a tiny piece of a much larger film. Detached from its production context, it was easy to discuss its appearance without asking who had actually made it.
In her May 3 interview with NBC News, Franklin said the painting took a few days of intermittent work and that she was fairly compensated. “Digital painting” is the useful description here: human authorship does not require oil paint, a canvas or a dramatically stained studio apron.
She Was Not Asked to Imitate AI
There is an important wrinkle in this story. Franklin clarified that she was not instructed to mimic AI. As documented in Fast Company’s May 4 coverage, she was making a cheap-looking meme; details viewers treated as AI clues were intended to be impressionistic.
So “an artist successfully copied the AI aesthetic” is a tidier headline than the evidence allows. It takes the audience’s interpretation and quietly promotes it to the artist’s brief.
That is particularly funny in a story about jumping to conclusions. We can admire the commission without inventing a second commission that never happened.
A Familiar Look Is Not a Production Record
Soft edges, strange lettering or an image that feels hastily assembled can prompt a reasonable question. They do not, by themselves, tell us which tools were used or who used them.
Humans can make rough images deliberately. They can simplify a background because the subject needs to read quickly. They can also make awkward choices without outsourcing the awkwardness to a machine. The internet managed several decades of questionable image editing before this particular argument arrived.
Franklin’s example is a useful reason to look for the creator and their account of the work before turning suspicion into an accusation. It is not a universal method for detecting generated pictures, and one time-lapse does not resolve every disputed image online.
A Big Release, a Small Detail Worth Crediting
The film opened in US cinemas on May 1, not May 4. Disney’s May 3 announcement put its worldwide opening estimate at $233.6 million. The company described it as the second-largest MPA global opening of 2026 to that point.
Against that scale, a passing image on a phone might seem like a very small contribution. But small contributions are still work. Someone must decide what the joke looks like, how quickly it is legible and which details can be left loose.
What this evidence establishes is Franklin’s commission. It does not establish how every other meme or visual effect in the film was produced, or that the entire production adopted a particular anti-AI manifesto.
The Credit Should Travel With the Image
This connects with a recurring theme in internet meme history: a widely shared image can become more recognisable than the person who made it. Repetition makes the joke familiar while its origins slip out of the frame.
Franklin’s posts put a name and a process back alongside this one. That is worth retaining when we share the story, rather than reducing it to another round of “humans versus machines” with the human left unnamed.
The satisfying part is straightforward: a funny, intentionally ungainly image had an illustrator behind it, and she got to explain her choices. Miranda might have opinions about the uniform. The cat would mainly want to know whether the fast-food job comes with fries.
