After announcing his impending arrest last Saturday, it would be easy to believe that the images of Donald Trump resisting arrest, wearing the typical orange prison jumpsuit and crying in a courtroom circulating on Twitter this weekend were real. But they are not. These are images created with artificial intelligence.
In a message posted on his Truth Social social network, the former US president set Tuesday the 21st as the date on which he would be arrested for allegedly paying a bribe to the porn actress known as Stormy Daniels. The call for his followers to "protest" to "take back our nation" sparked fears across a country that his supporters would commit violent acts like those on January 6, 2021 again. The arrest never took place, but the technology he had already done his job: the images have been seen by more than five million tweeters.
It was Eliot Higgins, a journalist and founder of the Bellingcat investigative collective, who created these deepfakes. The Briton shared the images on Twitter, but noted in the thread that they had been generated with Midjourney, a tool that uses generative AI to create images from a short text. In an interview with The Washington Post, Higgins acknowledged that "Midjourney understands simple prompts well, but more complex ones get strange results."
If you look closely at the footage, you'll see that as Trump tries to outrun the cops à la Forrest Gump, his tie changes color from black and white stripes to navy blue. Or maybe they've noticed that one of the NYPD officers trying to restrain the former US president is missing a finger, while the Republican appears to have polydactyly on his left hand. There's even an image of Trump wearing a police belt.
Do you need another clue? They are looking for the writings on the walls of McDonalds during his alleged escape from jail or the scared face of Melania Trump at the time of her husband's arrest. "If you ask Midjourney for expressions," Higgins explains to Wired magazine, "she tends to overdo it, with very pronounced skin folds."
Higgins did not create the images with malicious intent, but out of "boredom" while waiting, like everyone else, for the Republican to be arrested. However, from the platform they penalized him and without any explanation. According to the journalist, his access to the Midjourney server was blocked on Wednesday.
On the eve of the 2024 presidential elections in the United States, one should ask: what is the policy of Twitter -and other social networks- on images created with artificial intelligence tools? Although Higgins said he was not seeking to mislead users, Elon Musk's current platform policy explains that "sharing synthetic, manipulated, or out-of-context media that could mislead or confuse people and cause harm is not allowed."
Anyone who clicks on Higgins' thread will realize that the images aren't real, but it looks like someone has managed to circumvent Twitter's policies this time.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
