Trump Shares AI-Generated Deep fakes of Swift, Harris, and Musk to Boost Campaign Support, Spreading Election Disinformation

Department of Research, Strategic Studies and International Relations 21-08-2024

Donald Trump recently shared a series of AI-generated images featuring Taylor Swift, Kamala Harris, and ElonMusk, in an effort to bolster support for his presiden tial campaign.

These deep fakes, posted on Trump’s Truth Social platform, blur the line between satire and election disinformation, contributing to the spread of misleading content online.

The images included young women in “Swifties for Trump” T-shirts and a depiction of Swift as Uncle Sam urging voters to support Trump.

These screens hots, originally shared by right-wing accounts known for spreading mis information, falsely imply Swift’s end orsement of Trump, despiteherlack of support for him.

In addition, Trump also shared an AI-generated image of Kamala Harris leading a commun is tmilitary rally and a deep fake video of himself dancing with ElonMusk.

This use of AI-generated content raises concerns about the impact on the already muddled information land scapesur rounding the 2024 election, particularly given Trump’s history of promoting false hoods and conspiracy theories.

The potential for AI-generated content to influence elections has been alon gstanding concern a mong researchers, who warn that such technology mak esiteasier to produce and dissemin at edis information.

Around the world, AI-generated content has been used to troll political opponents, fake end orsements, and create deep fake audio to discredit candidates.

A mid the proliferation of AI-generated images, Trump also falsely claimed that a legitimate image from one of Harris’s campaign rallies was AI-generated, illustrating the “liar’s dividend” concept, where an increase in manipulated content leads to general distrust of all media, allowin gauthen ticmaterial to beeasily dismissed as fake.

Despiteat tempts by major AI companies to limit the creation of political content and images of public figures, work a round sexist. Elon Musk’s recently launched Grok image generator has led to a spike in AI-generated content related to the election, including controversial and potentially harmful images.

Notably, other Republican campaigns, such as Ron De Santis’s, have also used AI-generated content, including a fake image of Trump with Anthony Fauci and an RNC-produced ad attacking Joe Biden, further demonstrating the grow in grole of AI in political discourse.