Saturday Night Live’s host Glenn Powell plays a dad in a funny yet creepy AI sketch

Saturday Night Live season 51's latest episode, which premiered on November 15, 2025, welcomed Top Gun: Maverick and Set It Up fame actor Glenn Powell for his long-awaited hosting debut.

He did a series of sketches, gathered all the spotlight with his performance and charm on Saturday Night Live, playing either a jubilant Norwegian actor in a melodramatic film parody or channeling Liam Neeson’s brooding toughness in a Taken–themed sketch.

However, his AI photo animation sketch stood out for its humour and message, capturing something about our current cultural anxiety around Artificial Intelligence.

Glen Powell's AI Photo sketch on Saturday Night Live explored

The sketch begins with a grandmother in a senior home (played by Ashley Padilla) who welcomes her grandchildren to a Thanksgiving dinner at her residence, Sunnyside Senior Home, and the children have brought themselves a gift as well, to which she thanks them, adding:

I'm sure the Sunnyside Senior Home isn't where you wanted to spend your Thanksgiving.

The tone, which was warm and emotional, turns humorous as Nathan, played by Marcello Hernández, blurts out,

"Yeah, plus you probably don’t have a lot of Thanksgivings left,” earning an immediate scolding from his sister.

As a surprise, the siblings explain that they found a box of Grandma’s childhood photos while they were cleaning her house, and Nathan scanned them into a new app called Old-Time Photos Brought to Life.

They explained the app by showing Grandma a picture of her father, played by Glenn Powell, who appears on the screen, which then starts moving as he waves his hands, making Grandma thrilled and amazed.

She asked in pure amazement about how they did that, while the kids proudly explained that the A.I. analyzes the picture and projects how they'd move.

The kids show a next photo of Grandma’s mother, father, and the family dog. When the animation starts, her mother, instead of holding a cigarette, begins smoking a hot dog.

The family dog, Sadie, suddenly appears with tails at both ends, wagging furiously. Grandma cries in shock,

“Why did my mother smoke her hot dog?!” and then pleads, “Why did the computer do that to Sadie?!”

One of the grandkids then gave a hilarious explanation that the AI got confused, as there must be probably too much going on in the picture. 

The next picture showed Grandma’s father with his best friend, Cal Reiland, played by Mikey Day. Grandma remembered him as someone who “would get together and laugh and laugh.”

The animation showed Cal casually removing his pants to reveal an absurdly smooth, Ken-doll-like crotch. After witnessing this, Grandma gasped, asking the siblings about it. 

Her grandson, Nathan, then, trying his best to be logical, offered the most ridiculous reason with a straight face in this sketch of Saturday Night Live, noting:

I-I think what happened, Grandma, was… their bowling balls floated away, and then your dad paid Cal Reiland to show his Ken Doll crotch.

The sketch gets more hilarious when the grandkids proudly show the earliest baby photo they could find of Grandma as an infant. She suggests that maybe they should not animate this one.

“It’s just so nice the way it is,” she says. But Nathan insists, “It cost me ten credits just to upload it to the app, so we're going to." 

The animation of that final picture of Grandma as an infant with her parents turned into chaos, showing first Grandma’s mother’s upper body detaching and floating away. 

Glenn Powell’s character stretches baby-Grandma like an accordion, while Cal Reiland returns nude again like earlier, while a nuclear explosion wipes out the whole scene. Grandma stared in horror:

Oh, my God! She's cut in half!… Oh! Oh. Cal Reiland's back! Make him leave! [ Explosion ] Oh, no! A nuke went off!

She had had enough as she told the grandkids that she did not want to see any more photos now. The sketch was entertaining, humorous, but most of all delivered a hard message that AI can disrupt memories rather than preserving them, even when used with innocent intentions.

A blend of fun, frustration, and fear about giving technology control over the things that matter most, this Saturday Night Live sketch was weird, warm, unsettling, and painfully relevant, showing what people feel about artificial intelligence.

Stay tuned for more updates.