Education Secretary Linda McMahon drew criticism on Friday after she praised Ida B. Wells on Truth Social using an AI-generated image that was not of the civil rights activist and journalist. The picture attached to McMahon’s post showed a woman at a desk holding a quill pen and carried the label “Photo by Gemini.”
The mismatch was immediate and obvious to critics, who called the image historically inaccurate and unnecessarily fake. Wells, who died in 1931, documented lynchings of Black people in the South, co-founded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and fought for women’s right to vote. The post was another entry in McMahon’s HerStoryInAction series, which has also included AI images of Susan B. Anthony, Sojourner Truth and Sacagawea.
Paula Giddings, who wrote a biography of Wells in 2008, said the use of an AI-generated image cut against the very legacy McMahon was trying to honor. “While I appreciated the recognition of Ida B. Wells, the decision to use an AI generated image undermines the very values she stood for: truth-telling and her lifelong campaign against false representations,” Giddings said. “To use a fabricated image - even a respectful one - is not only unnecessary but is evidence that the secretary of education misreads [Wells’s] legacy.”
The Education Department said the images came from McMahon’s personal account and were not associated with the agency. Still, the post fits a broader pattern of digitally altered and AI-created images circulating from the Trump administration, including a January White House post that showed social justice activist Nekima Levy Armstrong in tears after her arrest. Critics have also objected to other images shared in that orbit, including depictions of Barack Obama and Michelle Obama as apes and images of Donald Trump as a king and the pope.
The problem for McMahon is not just that the image was wrong. It is that Wells spent her career fighting distortion, and the tribute meant to elevate her ended up doing the opposite.
