During the latest “Weekend Update” segment on Saturday Night Live, co-host Michael Che put Colin Jost in an uncomfortable position by debuting a video that appeared to show Jost partying with Donald Trump and the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
The digitally altered clip showed a dancing Jost inserted into infamous 1992 footage of Trump and Epstein at Mar-a-Lago. Che explained that the video was created using OpenAI’s video-generation tool, Sora. As the doctored footage rolled, a visibly unsettled Jost grimaced and shook his head before deadpanning to the audience, “Really excited for that to just be out there.”
The original 1992 video, which captures Trump and Epstein laughing together at a party years before the financier’s criminal cases came to light, has frequently circulated online amid discussions of their association. While the former president has consistently downplayed their relationship, flight logs and photographs have suggested a more complex connection. The SNL joke leverages this controversial history, which was recently reignited by a disputed letter allegedly sent from Trump to Epstein.
The stunt highlights a significant cultural moment where cutting-edge AI technology, once primarily associated with disinformation and deepfakes, is being adopted as a tool for mainstream satire. For SNL, it demonstrated a new frontier in comedy, where the past can be digitally rewritten for laughs in real time. The segment served as a potent reminder that in an age of powerful AI, the line between fact and fabrication can itself become the punchline.
