Take a good look at the “photo” at the top of this story.
Abraham Lincoln is sunk into a leather chair, looking a little rumpled, but just as dapper as ever, with his profile looking exactly like the old photos we’ve all seen. His left hand grips the neck of an electric guitar, and his right hand is ready to strum. Doesn't it look like a lost promo shot for the 1863 Gettysburg Music Festival?
There was no such music festival, of course. And obviously, none of this Abe-Lincoln-as-Keith Richards thing ever happened, either. Lincoln died in 1865, the first successful electric guitars didn't show up until the 1930s, and the Stratocaster-style guitar in this image didn't arrive until the 1950s.
What you are seeing is peak 2025: an AI-generated, photorealistic daydream. This is the fruit of an AI model that has inhaled countless photos and paintings, and which then exhaled this oddly convincing mash-up of Civil War and classic rock.
It's an utterly ridiculous deepfake – but in its own way, it's also a very Thanksgiving 2025 image.
The president who set our Thanksgiving table
Lincoln never plugged in an amp, but he did give us something that still shapes every November.
In 1863, with the Civil War raging and the outcome still uncertain, Lincoln proclaimed a national day of Thanksgiving on the last Thursday of November. As every schoolkid knows, he didn’t invent Thanksgiving, but he turned a scattered tradition of one-off national thanksgivings into the yearly November holiday we still celebrate today.
The Thanksgiving tradition we’re part of this week flows directly from a president who chose gratitude in the middle of catastrophe.
Read Lincoln's Thanksgiving proclamation today and what stands out is not denial of the horrors of the Civil War and the widespread suffering it had caused, but a difficult-to-achieve sense of balance and big-picture perspective on the events of the previous two years.
Lincoln acknowledged the “waste” of war and “widows, orphans, mourners and sufferers.” But he spent most of the rest of the proclamation listing blessings: harvests, industry, institutions, the hope of Union.
In a nutshell, Lincoln insisted that grief and gratitude share the same table.
That’s not a bad way to think about Thanksgiving 2025.
Time travel with a borrowed guitar
So, what do we do with this AI Lincoln and his Stratocaster?
On the surface, it’s just fun. When I first saw the image on social media, people had already decided that Keith Richards must have lent Lincoln the guitar, like a "Back to the Future" act of rock-and-roll diplomacy. It’s hard not to smile at the thought of Richards handing a battered Strat to a war-weary President Lincoln and saying, “Here, you’re going to need this.”
But the image is also a small example of how easily AI lets us bend time and facts.
Type a prompt like “Abraham Lincoln, black-and-white photo, sitting in a leather chair playing electric guitar like a 1960s rock legend,” and a few seconds later out pops this alternate history. Examine the beautiful details: All were invented (or at least, juxtaposed in this way), and all appear entirely believable.
That’s delightful when the goal is to imagine Lincoln as a bluesman. It’s decidedly less so when the same tools are pointed at manipulating elections, encouraging violence, or destroying the reputations of real, live people. The technology doesn’t care whether it’s used for satire or for manipulation. Which means that we do. We need to care.
What we’re thankful for this year
Which brings us back to Thanksgiving.
This has been another boisterous year for AI: continuous excitement about dramatic breakthroughs and innovations, along with a sometimes-potent mix of hype, fear, and very rational concerns.
Some days it feels like the story swings between “AI will save us” and “AI will end us,” with not much room in between.
Lincoln’s Thanksgiving proclamation quietly suggests another stance: Notice what is broken but also take stock of what is working – and what might be improved.
So here is what I am thankful for, looking at this truly impossible photograph:
- That we have tools that can turn a stray, whimsical idea into a vivid image in mere seconds
- That those tools can be used to make people think and smile, and not just to fool them and make them angry
- That Lincoln’s 1863 Thanksgiving proclamation still gives us a better guide to life and loss than any algorithm
Maybe the right way to think about AI this Thanksgiving is not as magic, but as an instrument. Powerful, loud, occasionally out of tune – but ultimately, something we pick up and decide what kind of music to make.
If that means imagining Abraham Lincoln playing a guitar that would not be invented for another 70 years – and somehow borrowing it from Keith Richards several decades after that – I’m willing to go there.
Wherever – and however – you are celebrating this holiday, thank you for being a curious, lifelong learner, for wanting to know what's good and true, for reading Colorado AI News, and for sharing this unique moment in human history with me.
Happy Thanksgiving.
