Donald Trump posted AI-generated fakes of Taylor Swift and her fans on social media in an apparent attempt to imply their endorsement of his candidacy for the US presidency.
As AI image generators deliver increasingly realistic images, it’s becoming almost impossible to distinguish a genuine image from an AI fake. Most image generation tools, like DALL-E and Midjourney, have alignment guardrails that prevent users from generating an image of celebrities or politicians.
Grok 2 uses the FLUX.1 model by Black Forest Labs, and is a lot less inhibited. Trump took to his Truth Social platform to share several AI fakes showing Taylor Swift fans, known as Swifties, wearing “Swifties for Trump” T-shirts.
He also shared an image of Taylor Swift appearing to encourage voters to vote for Trump. While some of the images appeared with a “satire” tag, Trump commented “I accept!” without clarifying whether he believed the images to be satire or real.
Trump also posted an image of Kamala Harris addressing a communist rally, although, with this image, it’s more obvious that it was AI-generated.
Swift hasn’t publicly endorsed either Trump or Harris, but she has been critical of Trump in the past. She also hasn’t commented on Trump’s posts yet but she’s unlikely to be a fan of AI fakes after the explicit AI-generated images of her surfaced earlier this year.
Last week Trump posted an AI-generated video on X showing him and Elon Musk dancing. The video isn’t great and its intent to be humorous is obvious. However, when social media platforms don’t insist on fake content labels, it gives people like Trump an ‘I was only joking’ defense for posts where the intent is less obvious.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 15, 2024
Politicians can sow doubt by simply calling ‘fake’ on content they don’t like. Earlier this month, Trump claimed that a photo showing thousands of supporters attending a campaign rally held by Harris and her running mate Tim Walz was AI-generated.
In a Truth Social post, Trump said, “Has anyone noticed that Kamala CHEATED at the airport?…There was nobody at the plane, and she ‘A.I.’d’ it, and showed a massive ‘crowd’ of so-called followers, BUT THEY DIDN’T EXIST!”
Whether he believes that or not doesn’t seem to matter. The fact that AI image generators are so good now has the internet awash with people on both sides of the fake vs true argument.
Politicians have a hard-earned reputation for being economical with the truth, and Trump certainly doesn’t have a monopoly on this. AI has just made it a lot easier for politicians to shape the beliefs of their electorate.
