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Comment by klyrs | Hacker News Reader

Leading image caption

> An attendee draws on a tablet as she copies the famous painting by Vermeer 'Girl with a Pearl Earring' using THQ's uDraw Game Tablet which works on PS3 and Xbox 360 at E3 in Los Angeles, California June 7, 2011. REUTERS/Fred Pouser/File Photo

Is this product placement??? Surely there were other pictures that could have been used here... like... what I wanted to see is a person with their head glued to a painting. Not an ad.

To the naysayers (tongue in cheek): this isn't just any old vandalism, this is an oil painting. The symbology checks out.

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Photo is from 2011. More plausible explanation: it's just the first file photo that comes up when you search for 'girl with a pearl earring' in reuters' news photo archive.

Or it's what the AI language model subeditor chose because its temperature was set to 'cute' today.

What bugs me most, though, is that the image has a Wiimote in it, but the caption only mentions PS3and Xbox compatibility.

I need to pedantically point out that the oil in oil paints is derived from Linseed oil (and thus carbon negative, potentially locally sourced, organic, and shouldn't be protestable)

For the sake of the joke, I'll grant that oil paintings are a form of sustainable carbon sequestration.

Don't let details get in the way of a good gimmick. /sarcasm

The weirdest part of that description is that the tablet "which works on PS3 and Xbox 360" seems to have a Wii controller slotted into it.

I'm pretty sure they don't even sell that product anymore. So it's not really an ad?

Not only do they not sell it, that tablet was a financial disaster. It did fairly well on the Wii and so they decided to make a ton for the 360 and PS3. They barely sold.

Funny, I didn't even notice the date. Still, I want to see the dang activist with their head glued to glass with a painting behind it.

sound like just the caption of the stock photo copy/pasted, they typically have these kind of very specific descriptions

This got me to click through and I actually chuckled. Bizarre. Is this one of those AI-written articles?!

It definitely is product placement. What is going on behind the scenes at Reuters to allow for that is probably quite interesting.

For a 10 year old device that's not even sold anymore?

The photo and caption were pulled from their resource pool.

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