AI-generated deepfakes showing Donald Trump being arrested went viral on Twitter following news of the former president’s possible indictment this week.
A grand jury was expected to indict Trump this week on charges linked to hush payments to porn star Stormy Daniels.
The fake images shared by journalist Elliot Higgins on Twitter have been viewed over five million times so far.
The series of images showed Trump resisting police officers and finally getting arrested. In some of the fabricated pictures, the 45th president is seen trying to make a run for it.
The deepfake series also includes some of Melania Trump, along with the former president’s son, Donald Trump Jr protesting the arrest.
Higgins used Midjourney, an artificial intelligence text-to-image generator, to generate the lifelike images.
‘Making pictures of Trump getting arrested while waiting for Trump’s arrest,’ tweeted Higgins, who is also the founder of investigative collective Bellingcat.
Higgings said that, for several images, he submitted the text prompt, ‘Donald Trump falling over while getting arrested. Fibonacci Spiral. News footage’.
The fake images looked eerily real but if you look closely, you can see that the text on the police officers’ uniforms is gibberish, along with distorted faces and hands. These are usually tell-tale signs of AI-generated images.
‘The Trump arrest image was really just casually showing both how good and bad Midjourney was at rendering real scenes like the first image has Trump with three legs and a police belt,’ Higgins told the Associated Press.
‘I had assumed that people would realise Donald Trump has two legs, not three, but that appears not to have stopped some people passing them off as genuine, which highlights that lack of critical thinking skills in our educational system.’
Other AI-generated images depicting Trump’s imaginary arrest, have been doing the rounds on the internet with many people falling for it at first glance.
The incident shows the disturbing power of AI-generated images in perpetuating fake news.
As for Trump, he remains free as he is unlikely to be indicted and arrested this week.
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