Mitchell Robinson had a real photo with a real friend in it, and his first instinct was to erase the friend and generate a woman who doesn’t exist in his place. Then he captioned it like he’d leveled up his life: “Crazy how good I’ll look in a relationship with a country girl 🫶.”
There’s no girlfriend, real or otherwise.
A 7-foot Celtics center had an actual friendship sitting right there in the frame and decided a machine could fake being loved better than the real version could manage.
TotalProSports surfaced the before-and-after first: a nighttime street photo of Robinson next to a buddy, run through an AI edit that swapped the guy out for a blonde woman in a cowboy hat, crop top, and denim shorts. It wasn’t blended in or subtle. It read like a straight substitution, the kind you’d make to a rotation, not a relationship.
This isn’t a thirst trap that flopped. A thirst trap at least requires an actual person to exist and get thirsted over. Robinson skipped that part entirely. He had real intimacy right there in the photo, a guy who liked him enough to pose for a picture, and he deleted him for a generated stranger because apparently that read as more flattering than the truth standing next to him.
IBTimes clocked the comparison pulling past 1.7 million views, more attention than most of Boston’s offense gets some nights. People weren’t laughing at a bad Photoshop job. Bad Photoshop jobs are funny for an afternoon and everyone forgets about them. This one stuck around because of what it revealed about the guy who made it, not what it looked like.
BroBible rounded up the response, and it split into two insults that both land. “Bro Mitch posts emo broken loverboy st everyday 😭 wouldnt expect anything else,” read one reply, which stings precisely because it means this wasn’t a one-off, just the most literal version of a personality he already had. “How are you tall in NBA and still can’t pull b*hes?” read another, getting at the same joke from the other direction: a guy who signed for three years and $47.4 million with the Celtics this summer decided it was easier to generate a girlfriend than go find one.
Their own account summed up the pile-on in one post:
https://twitter.com/BroBible/status/2114749219210674602
To be fair, athletes fake personas constantly and nobody blinks at a filtered gym photo or a caption some intern wrote. Robinson didn’t do that, though. He didn’t touch his own face or his own highlights. He touched the one part of the photo that belonged to someone else, a real person who’d shown up for him, and ran it through a generator instead.
He didn’t need the upgrade. He needed someone to tell him the real photo was already good enough.
