Republican candidate for U.S. President Donald Trump on Wednesday denied any knowledge about the creation of AI-generated images that featured young women wearing t-shirts that said “Swifties for Trump” and a poster where Taylor Swift seemingly endorsed the former president.
The former President shared screenshots of AI-generated images on his Truth Social account on Sunday, adding “I accept!” to the post. One of the images included a deepfake of Taylor Swift that read “Taylor Wants You to Vote for Donald Trump,” the image a play on World War I and II era “Uncle Sam” posters.
In an interview with Fox Business’ Grady Trimble, Trump acknowledged that he knew they weren't real. He asked if he was afraid that he would get sued by the megastar.
“I don’t know anything about them other than somebody else generated them,” Trump said. “I didn't generate them; somebody came out, they said, ‘Oh, look at this.’ These were all made up by other people.”
Trump, along with other prominent figures—including current President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, and Pope Francis—have been the subject of AI-generated deepfakes, with the spread of such images receiving a mention during Biden’s State of the Union address in March.
In an effort to curb disinformation using their models, many AI developers have worked hard to keep their respective tools from being used to generate content related to elections and elected officials. Still, AI tools like xAI’s Grok have much more permissive settings, making fake images easy to create.
Trump went on to echo a statement he made in an interview with Fox Business in February, where he called AI “scary” and “dangerous.”
“AI is always very dangerous in that way; it's happening with me, too,” Trump said. “They're making, having me speak. I speak perfectly, absolutely perfectly, on AI, and I'm, like, endorsing other products and things. It's a little bit dangerous out there.”
Despite calling AI dangerous, Trump—in the lead-up to the Democratic National Convention taking place in Chicago—had also shared an AI-generated image of Vice President Harris on X (aka Twitter).
Edited by Ryan Ozawa.
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