donald trump, the leading Republican candidate and former president of the United States, posted a message on social media stating that he would be arrested next week. However, it was a false arrest expectation with the aim of causing an uproar in American society.
The message had such an impact that some believed it was real and images of his alleged arrest created with artificial intelligence by Eliot Higgins were disseminated. Many people, especially supporters of Trump, expressed their disgust at believing that the images were real. In an interview with The Washington PostHiggins acknowledged having used a tool artificial intelligence to generate the images from a text description.
Making pictures of Trump getting arrested while waiting for Trump’s arrest. pic.twitter.com/4D2QQfUpLZ
—Eliot Higgins (@EliotHiggins) March 20, 2023
Higgins wrote as a request to the AI: “donald trump falling while being arrested ”, a request that artificial intelligence fulfilled in seconds. Higgins shared the generated images on Twitter, not knowing what would happen next. The images went viral on various social networks, and many users claimed that the arrest of Trump it had already happened without verifying the authenticity of the material. Higgins commented that he was only kidding and expected only a few people to share the post, however, the images received over 5 million views in just 2 days. Also, some of the generated images are difficult to distinguish as fake.
In situations like this, social networks are often slow to react to those users who download the images and re-share them, claiming that Donald Trump has been arrested. Twitter, for example, took more than 24 hours to flag tweets with the following warning: “donald trump has not been arrested. These images were generated by a AI“.
The US authorities are concerned about the current situation, as anything related to donald trump it can unleash a disaster, as happened with the assault on the Capitol in early 2021.
In this case, the former president had also urged his followers to protest his “imminent” arrest. Senator Mark R. Warner, chairman of the US Senate Intelligence Committee, has warned for years about the potential misuse of the media to spread misinformation and sow confusion and discord. Now, with the massive availability of tools for artificial intelligence highly capable, this concern is even greater.
Via: Twitter
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