Donald Trump posted AI-generated fakes of Taylor Swift and her fans on social media in an apparent try and imply their endorsement of his candidacy for the US presidency.
As AI image generators deliver increasingly realistic images, it’s becoming almost not possible to differentiate a real image from an AI fake. Most image generation tools, like DALL-E and Midjourney, have alignment guardrails that prevent users from generating a picture of celebrities or politicians.
Grok 2 uses the FLUX.1 model by Black Forest Labs, and is lots less inhibited. Trump took to his Truth Social platform to share several AI fakes showing Taylor Swift fans, generally known as Swifties, wearing “Swifties for Trump” T-shirts.
He also shared a picture of Taylor Swift appearing to encourage voters to vote for Trump. While among the images appeared with a “satire” tag, Trump commented “I accept!” without clarifying whether he believed the photographs to be satire or real.
Trump also posted a picture 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 up to now. She also hasn’t commented on Trump’s posts yet but she’s unlikely to be a fan of AI fakes after the specific AI-generated images of her surfaced earlier this yr.
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 clear. However, when social media platforms don’t insist on fake content labels, it gives people like Trump an ‘I used to be only joking’ defense for posts where the intent is less obvious.
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Politicians can sow doubt by simply calling ‘fake’ on content they don’t like. Earlier this month, Trump claimed that a photograph showing hundreds 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 on the airport?…There was no person on the plane, and she or he ‘A.I.’d’ it, and showed an enormous ‘crowd’ of so-called followers, BUT THEY DIDN’T EXIST!”
Whether he believes that or not doesn’t appear to matter. The proven fact that AI image generators are so good now has the web awash with people on either side of the fake vs true argument.
Politicians have a hard-earned fame for being economical with the reality, and Trump definitely doesn’t have a monopoly on this. AI has just made it lots easier for politicians to shape the beliefs of their electorate.
