Images of former president Donald Trump in handcuffs and flanked by police officers went viral across social media Monday and Tuesday. But they aren’t real.
As news consumers wait to see if Trump will be indicted, AI-generated images depicting his arrest are spreading online, raising questions and concerns over media literacy and deepfakes as the tools to create them become more accessible.
Eliot Higgins — the founder of the Netherlands-based investigative journalism group, Bellingcat — took to Twitter to post versions he made on Midjourney, a popular AI image generator. Some of the images are photorealistic, while some feel more like CGI from a video game.
Higgins disclosed that his images were fake, captioning the Twitter thread “Making pictures of Trump getting arrested while waiting for Trump’s arrest.” He and others made the art as a form of parody. Several versions of fake Trump arrest images began widely circulating on social media, initially by their creators.
But along the way, the art was reposted and reshared across Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok, as if they were “photos” of a major news event, not AI-generated art of a fake occurrence.
How can you tell if a photo is AI generated?
In some cases, social media platforms’ content moderation services are attempting to flag the images of Trump getting arrested as fake. But without a content flag, some of the art can be convincing.
As noted by Wired, even while image generators are getting smarter, they still make mistakes in the smaller details. While the main subject of the image may look legit, the rest might appear to be an afterthought. For instance, Trump’s face looks realistic in most of the fakes, but his body proportions look contorted and almost melted or surreal.
Other hints…
