“I don’t know anything about them other than somebody else generated them.”
Playing Dumb
Last week, former president Donald Trump shared AI-generated endorsements by Taylor Swift and her fans, proudly announcing that he was delighted to accept their support.
“I accept!” Trump proclaimed in a post on Truth Social. One image he included was that of a fake Swift depicted as Uncle Sam, captioned “TAYLOR WANTS YOU TO VOTE FOR DONALD TRUMP.”
Unsurprisingly, Trump has since denied any wrongdoing, claiming that he had nothing to do with the pictures he posted — which, at the time of writing, are still live on Truth Social.
“I don’t know anything about them other than somebody else generated them,” he told Fox Business. “I didn’t generate them.”
Former President Trump on the AI-generated images of Taylor Swift: “I don’t know anything about them other than somebody else generated them.” pic.twitter.com/gBEzxx4L4o
— Grady Trimble (@Grady_Trimble) August 21, 2024
Reality Distortion Field
It’s a pitiful response, especially considering he had posted an AI-generated image of his presidential rival Kamala Harris leading a fake communist rally just hours before his Taylor Swift gaffe.
The hypocrisy is unmistakable at this point. Just last week, Trump took to Truth Social to wrongly accuse Harris of using AI to fake a picture of her in front of a big crowd.
During his latest interview with Fox, Trump also claimed that the images were “all made up by other people,” seemingly admitting to sharing fake, AI-generated images of Swift fans: “AI is always very dangerous in that way.”
It’s a new low for a former president who has a decades-long record of lying and distorting the truth. At the same time, it’s entirely possible Trump is as clueless as he makes himself out to be. For one, the septuagenarian reportedly doesn’t use a computer and used to have an aide who followed him around with a wireless printer to print out the news for him. Besides, he’s having trouble stringing words together to form a coherent sentence.
In other words, there’s a good chance the former president has absolutely no idea how generative AI works.
Of course, Trump is now using AI as a way to play the victim, a calling card of the former reality TV host.
“We’re seeing it all the time,” Trump told Fox in a characteristically babbling and incoherent response. “It’s happening with me, too. They’re making, they’re having me speak — I speak perfectly, I mean absolutely perfectly on AI and I’m, like, endorsing other products and things. It’s a little bit dangerous out there.”
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