AI is changing Trump and already shaking up the presidential campaign

The BBC has revealed the existence of fake images featuring US presidential candidate Donald Trump, to boost his campaign.

The 2024 US elections reveal the potential of artificial intelligence in politics. For example, in January 2024, the creation of a chatbot bearing the image of Democratic candidate Dean Phillips as a campaign tool was not unanimous. So much so that the company OpenAI, owner of ChatGPT with which the chatbot was created, had taken the decision to prohibit its use in electoral campaigns. There BBC revealed this Monday that images representing former President Donald Trump surrounded by African-American people, and relayed by his teams, are in reality deepfakes, that is to say false images. A falsification that changes Donald Trump into a politician popular with black citizens, appearing in disadvantaged neighborhoods that would be very hospitable to him.

Many of his AI-generated images feature the Republican candidate with so-called African-American voters. The situations are diverse and varied but in each of the images, the characters display big smiles alongside Mr. Trump, himself smiling. Relayed on social networks, Facebook in particular, these images directly target the African-American electorate that the former president is trying to rally to his cause for the next presidential elections in November 2024. However, the British media specifies that it does not There is no evidence to link the creation of these images to the Republican candidate’s campaign team.

The BBC reveals that some of the misleading images were made by Mark Kaye, the presenter of a Florida-based radio show. The latter included these images in an article that he himself published where he addresses the question of the support of African-American voters for Donald Trump, giving the impression that all these people support the candidate. Questioned by the BBC, Mark Kaye stressed that he had never claimed that these images were real. He said: “If a person’s vote is influenced by a photo seen on Facebook then that is an issue with that person and not the post itself.”

If the comments under the photos suggest that many Internet users did not see the deception, certain details reveal the inauthenticity of the images. Looking closely, we can see that in the image depicting Donald Trump in the middle of a crowd of people that one of the members of this fake photograph only has four fingers. The characters’ skin also appears too shiny. In another scene generated in the same way, we can also see a man with three arms.

The objective of these false images is to influence the vote of voters. During the previous US presidential election in 2020, the African-American electorate largely supported Democratic candidate Joe Biden. As indicated by a poll carried out by the New York Times and Sienna College, the current American president had benefited from 92% of their support in six key states. This same survey reveals that this rate has fallen to 71% for the next elections. As Cliff Albright, co-founder of the campaign group Black Voters Matter, explains to the BBC: “There have been documented attempts to re-target disinformation at black communities, particularly young black voters.” Disinformation tactics had already targeted the community during the 2020 elections.