Looking at her publicity photo, you’d be tempted to think that Patricia Reichman is the youngest-looking 59-year-old woman in the world. We’ve featured our share of “ladies of eternal youth” on Oddity Central over the years, but Reichman definitely takes the cake. Only, in reality, she looks very different; some would say she is a totally different person.
Patricia Reichman, a councilwoman elected to represent a neighbourhood in Rotterdam, Netherlands, has been criticised for using generative AI to edit the official candidate photo that she personally provided to the point where she became unrecognisable. Despite the obvious difference, she insisted that she is the person in the photo.
“The photo in the neighbourhood paper was of too low a resolution, so I ran it through an online tool to boost the pixel count,” Reichman told Dutch newspaper Algemeen Dagblad. “It really is my photo; that really is me. I look a bit different at the moment, but that is due to medication I’m taking. That will be ending soon.”
The Dutch councilwoman faced a lot of criticism after photos of her next to the one she obviously edited went viral online, but she continued claiming that she genuinely looks a lot younger than 59.
“When I’m out and about with my son, people often assume I’m his girlfriend,” she said. “I hear it all the time, that I look remarkably young for my age.”
Even Reichman’s political party, Leefbaar Rotterdam, acknowledged that her photo was clearly digitally edited, and asked her to resign from her public office, but she refused. So it was left with no choice but to expel her.
“When the information provided during the job interview proves not to correspond with reality, there is no basis of trust to continue working together,” the Leefbaar Rotterdam statement reads. “The photo has clearly been heavily edited with AI and is not a realistic representation.”
