A Video by the DeSantis War Room: How Artificial Intelligence and Reality are Changing in the Era of the COVID-19 Pandemic
The DeSantis War Room shared a video showcasing Trump’s support for Anthony Fauci, who was a White House Chief Medical advisor and was a leader in developing the US response to COVID-19. Fauci has become a hated figure in right-wing politics, particularly among the anti-vax movement, and the attack ad seeks to grow this base of support for DeSantis by portraying Trump and Fauci as close collaborators.
A Republican senator said that he was unacceptable to mock Donald Trump with fake images. Georgia’s Marjorie Taylor-Greene, a Republican, was the one who retweeted the message. There are fake Artificial Intelligence campaign ads that need to be taken down.
This isn’t the first time that technology has been used in the campaign. The Republican National Committee released an ad in April using AI-generated images to depict a series of imagined crises if President Joe Biden were to win a second term.
The rapid improvement and deployment of generative AI, which can produce realistic images, audio, video, and text, is raising alarms over how it could worsen the spread of misleading claims and propaganda, and be used to create entirely plausible yet false depictions of events that never happened.
“These problems will eventually get resolved, and we can expect more difficulty to distinguish between reality and fiction when it comes to audio and video,” he said.
The three fake pictures are all of the same style as the real one, with weird hair, unnatural arm and hand rendering, and nonsensical text on the backdrop.
“It was particularly sneaky to intermix the real and the fake images, as if the presence of the real image would give more credibility to the other images,” said Hany Farid, a digital forensics expert and professor at the University of California, Berkeley.
In a collage of six pictures of the two men, three appear to be AI-generated fakes depicting Trump and Fauci embracing. The other three are not pictures of the two men together.
The video, posted Monday on Twitter by the Florida governor’s rapid response team, slammed the former president’s alleged support of Fauci, who has become a punching bag for Republicans for his role in crafting the nation’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The campaign backing Ron DeSantis as Republican presidential nominee in 4 years uses what experts call artificial intelligence deepfakes in their attack ad against Donald Trump.
Deep Fake News: The Fakes Behind The Top – Left Banner of The White House, Washington, and the DeSantis Ad
There is a recreation of the sign behind the podium that says The White House, Washington, which can be seen in the top- left image. You can see this sign from March 27th.
Compare this to the sign that appears in the top-left image from the DeSantis ad. The shade of blue is different and the text is nonsense. Rendering legible text is a challenge in the current artificial intelligence image generation systems. You can also see how the faces of Trump and Fauci are unrealistically posed, and how Trump’s hair is oddly smooth and featureless.
Digital media forensics expert Siwei Lyu said there were flaws in the three images. Lyu is certain these are not real photos.
Although some cases are obvious fakes, campaigns continue to blur the line between parody and propaganda. The mixture of fake and real images in a single piece makes it harder to distinguish them. It takes what is a plausible narrative — of Trump and Fauci as friendly collaborators — and encourages viewers already inclined to believe this framing to see it is a well-evidenced truth. Deepfakes are helping politicians create their own reality.