It begins with Joe Biden, celebrating his election victory. Immediately after, a bombardment. Planes, soldiers, protests. It’s China invading Taiwan. Then dilapidated buildings, but this time it’s New York: everything has collapsed, then the collapse of the financial system. An attack on migrants follows, of course. “What would happen if our borders disappeared?”. Everything you see in the video is fake, it’s just AI generated images. A first taste of what will be the US presidential elections.
The video generated by AI is on behalf of the Republicans, who thus responded to the announcement that Joe Biden will run for re-election in the 2024 presidential elections. “What if the weakest president we’ve ever had was re-elected?” says the material posted on YouTube. Shyly, in the description, they clarify: “An AI-generated look at the possible future of the country.”
It is not clear what tools they used. Several of the most popular AI image generators, such as DALL-E either midjourney, limit the creation of images with political figures. But Midjourney, for example, has already made headlines before because of the virals of Pope Francis and Donald Trump. The video goes so far as to show a fake, defeated and sad Joe Biden in the Oval Office of the White House.
Is the use of false hyper-realistic images ethical in a political campaign? In the Republican party these questions are not usually asked. Example: the scandal of Cambridge Analytica. The private data of more than 86 million Facebook users was used to manipulate voters in the 2016 campaign. What happened next? Donald Trump, President.
The Republicans’ AI video, the first of many?
This is the first time the Republican Party has generated 100% AI video, a spokesperson told Axios. The strategy suggests that Republicans are “taking the lead from Jack Posobiec,” Sam Gregory, director of the Witness human rights organization, told The Washington Post.
Posobiec is a far-right militant in the US, who in 2016 promoted Pizzagate, a conspiracy theory that linked Hillary Clinton to a pedophilia ring. The also television presenter published in February a fake video, showing Biden announcing the forced recruitment of young people for the war in Ukraine. A “sneak peek of things to come,” Posobiec says at the end of the AI-generated content, in keeping with the message of the video Republicans released today.
There are some precedents in US politics. Barack Obama, for example, was the victim in 2018 of a deepfake. The former president appears in a fake video saying that Donald Trump was a “total and utter moron”. But the quality of the material is now laughable, when compared to what new AI-powered tools can achieve.
The virulence of networks
The photos of Donald Trump arrested seemed so real that some media outlets published them as true. The difference then is that it was material created by a journalist, with the intention of demonstrating how easy it was to generate false images with the new technology. Now, it is the Republican Party that turns to AI-generated material for its official campaign for the US presidency.
The Democratic Party, for now, has downplayed it. The executive director of the Democratic National Committee, Sam Cornale, said in a tweet that the use of AI by Republicans was hopeless.
The combo of fake images and social networks is fatal. For this reason, Meta —Facebook and Instagram parent company— banned AI-generated videos in 2020 that could mislead users. Twitter also had a similar policy, but things have changed on this social network since the arrival of Elon Musk. For example, this week he granted verification to several fake accounts. But there is still much to see: The US presidential elections are scheduled for November 2024. The campaign is just beginning.