Former US President Donald Trump has made a series of baseless accusations against Vice President Kamala Harris, claiming that she used AI to artificially inflate the size of a rally crowd. In a post on Truth Social, Trump wrote, “Did anyone notice Kamala cheating at the airport?”, referring to an August 7 image showing Air Force Two surrounded by a crowd of people holding signs supporting Harris and Walz on a runway in Michigan. Trump claimed the crowd was not real and was created by AI.
Trump’s claims were quickly debunked by local sources, such as the news site MLive, which reported that the rally at Detroit Metro Airport attracted about 15,000 people, with the crowd stretching all the way to the runway. Multiple angles of the scene clearly show a large presence, and fact-checking site Snopes also ran the image through artificial intelligence detection tools, confirming that it was most likely an authentic photo.
Interestingly, the image Trump cited does not appear to have come directly from the official channels of Harris’ campaign. According to a local New York news outlet, NY1, the photo was initially posted online by a video editor who was a former Biden campaign staffer, around 10:01 p.m. on the day of the event. The image was subsequently shared widely across various internet platforms.
While social media is still trying to find effective solutions to combat AI-generated disinformation, Trump seems to be exploiting the very existence of this technology to question reality and discredit documented events. This tactic is not new and has precedents in recent years. An example dates back to 2021, when the lawyer of Kyle Rittenhouse, involved in a controversial trial related to the protests in Kenosha, argued that using the zoom function on an iPad would have manipulated video evidence through artificial intelligence. Elon Musk also attempted, albeit less successfully, to use a similar defense, arguing that some past Tesla videos may have been falsified via “deepfakes.”
Trump’s obsession with crowd size is well documented. In 2017, shortly after his inauguration, his then-White House spokesman, Sean Spicer, falsely claimed that the event had drawn “the largest crowd ever for an inauguration,” despite video evidence showing a relatively small crowd compared to Barack Obama’s inauguration in 2009. Trump also recently falsely claimed that his speech on January 6, 2021, would draw as many people as the 1963 March on Washington.
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