Not surprising, but definitely gross.
Hack Job
Over the weekend, Elon Musk posted an AI-doctored video of Vice President Kamala Harris on X-formerly-Twitter — and thus far, he hasn’t apologized for it.
In the video, which Musk posted on July 26 and has since been viewed hundreds of millions of times, the presidential candidate’s voice was altered to make it sound like she was bragging about being “the ultimate diversity hire.”
“I’m both a woman and a person of color,” the fake-Harris in the altered video says, “so if you criticize anything I say, you’re both sexist and racist.”
“This is amazing,” the billionaire Donald Trump booster boasted of the video, originally posted by an account that calls itself @MrReaganUSA.
In that initial post, the user admitted that the video was a parody. When Musk posted it as his own, he made no such acknowledgment, seemingly violating X’s own rules barring users from sharing “synthetic, manipulated or out-of-context media that may deceive or confuse people and lead to harm.”
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At press time, the video has been up for nearly three days, and although Musk spent the weekend posting his usual drivel — including misinformation suggesting Democrats are “importing” undocumented people to vote illegally and that the party controls Google — he hasn’t said a word online or in response to press requests, including from Futurism, about the AI-manipulated video he shared.
Though Musk himself has stayed mum on the subject, the Harris campaign hasn’t.
“We believe the American people want the real freedom, opportunity, and security Vice President Harris is offering,” declares a statement from the campaign to CNN, “not the fake, manipulated lies of Elon Musk and Donald Trump.”
Electioneering aside, it’s not at all hard to imagine that if a Democratic donor shared a doctored video of Trump without disclosure or apology, Musk and his fellow travelers would be up in arms about it — but then again, that crowd isn’t exactly known for not being hypocrites.
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