The news of Huang’s affair filled X with memes about Chinese spies and mistresses in a variety of configurations. By Monday evening, Huang had reached the fashion world’s stylish netizens: The Instagram account @hidden.ny, an anonymous digital mood board and cultural platform, posted a series of images of Huang in a studded leather jacket. The caption read, “NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang in Hedi Slimane SLP Studded Leather Jacket after admitting to affair with alleged Chinese spy.”
It’s well-known that Huang is a leather-jacket enthusiast, and he is seldom seen in public without one. In July Sotheby’s auctioned one of his pre-worn jackets, this one by Tom Ford. The auction house originally estimated its sale price between $40,000 and $60,000, but it sold for a whooping $960,000.
Despite Huang’s penchant for a black-leather moment, it appears that he was, in fact, not wearing the Saint Laurent jacket as previously shared by Hidden and a variety of other accounts on both Instagram and X. A quick run through an AI image detector debunked Huang’s being a “Slimaniac”—what Slimane’s fervent fans often call themselves—at least in this particular case. SynthID, the detector created by Google DeepMind to identify AI-generated or enhanced media by OpenAI, Google, Kakao, and, of course, Nvidia, detected that the images posted by Hidden and other users online had been generated or edited with OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT. To burst the bubble even further, it appears that the images used as the base for this particular edit weren’t taken following the disclosure of Huang’s affair, but from a trip to South Korea in June. (He was wearing a Dior jacket by Jonathan Anderson then.)
Just last week, a Free Press reporter went viral on X for posting an image she had not disclosed as enhanced by AI as part of her election-night reporting, which was also debunked by VF. It’s not necessarily fun being the AI fashion police, and the stakes of netizens giving Huang the fashion-meme treatment versus a reporter using AI to illustrate a point are not the same. But as the use of AI becomes harder to detect, disclosure has become paramount.
Apologies to the menswear crowd for ruining the fantasy—but did you all really want Huang to be a certified “Hedi boy” after this news? As one comment under the original post read, Huang might be the “first person in history to have negative aura wearing archive Hedi.”