How AI Fooled People Into Thinking Trump Had Been Arrested
If you’re active on Twitter, you might have seen some shocking images of former US President Donald Trump being arrested by police officers, struggling with them, and even running away from them. Turns out, none of this was real. But how did this all happen?
The Donald Trump Arrest That Never Happened
The former US President shared a supposed leak through his officialTruth Social handleon March 18th. The post stated that he was expecting an arrest on Tuesday of the following week for “old and fully debunked” charges against him. It wasn’t long before images of Trump’s arrest began popping up all over the internet.
The images showed what appeared to be footage of Trump’s arrest by a group of law enforcement officers.
The Images Were AI-Generated
The images, however, were not authentic. They were deepfakes made withMidjourney, an AI image generator. Midjourney uses a deep learning algorithm to generate pictures from scratch using text prompts. In this case, the text prompts were variations of Trump getting arrested.
Deepfake technologyhas been around for a while, and it is becoming increasingly sophisticated. AI-generated images used to be easily identifiable: they lacked details and realism. However,Midjourney’s latest release (v5)fixed most of these issues and was, in fact, the version used to generate Trump’s arrest deepfakes.
How the Images Went Viral
Eliot Higgins, an investigative journalist, created the first versions of the Trump arrest deepfakes to visualize what a Trump arrest would look like. He posted them on his Twitter account. While his caption was clear from the get-go that the images were fake, it didn’t take long for the post to go viral.
As the images spread across social media, many people believed it was real. Trump’s post on Truth Social already had people suspicious, and the realistic images only fueled the fire. It took a while before it became clear that the photos were fake and the arrest story had been a hoax.
Social media posts “reporting” the fake arrest have been deleted or have the misinformation label on them. As a penalty, Midjourney also banned Higgins from their server for a month, perThe Washington Post.
The Era of Deepfakes Requires Vigilance
The Trump arrest deepfakes highlight the alarming advancements in AI technology. Fake images can now be created with incredible ease and look so realistic that it is difficult to tell what’s real from what isn’t. Vigilance is now more critical than ever when it comes to online content.
Deepfakes are becoming more prevalent. Here’s how they can threaten your online privacy and how to avoid being taken in.
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