Overview

• Viewers flagged glaring artifacts in a short promotional montage — distorted faces, extra or merged fingers, and garbled signage — and accused Smith of faking fans.
• Waxy.org traced multiple crowd shots to real festival photos and concluded Smith’s team likely animated stills with image‑to‑video tools before platform processing amplified glitches.
• YouTube confirmed it is experimenting on select Shorts with machine‑learning image enhancement to unblur and denoise videos, saying the test does not use generative AI.
• Comparisons show the Instagram and Facebook versions look cleaner than the YouTube copy, supporting reports that platform post‑processing worsened the visual distortions.
• Smith and his representatives have not issued a substantive response, though an associate defended him on Instagram, as the U.K. leg of the tour continues this week.