Over the weekend, former president and current presidential contender Donald Trump took to multiple social media accounts to share a string of xenophobic and outwardly racist anti-immigration posts, complete with a “VOTE TRUMP 2024” logo to show his campaign’s stamp of approval.
At least one of those images was not what it appeared. It shows a run down-looking hospital with the word “EMERGENCY” scrawled in misshapen red letters across its face. A long line of people are pictured waiting to get in. Over the image, huge letters warn that “KAMALA HARRIS PLEDGED FREE HEALTHCARE FOR ILLEGALS.” Underneath that, it ominously adds: “THEY’RE COMING TO COLLECT.”
In other words, the image is designed to depict a flood of illegal immigrants rushing to capitalize on America’s — famously free? — healthcare system. But if you look closer look at the image, something about it seems… off.
Indeed, as caught by the X user “Insane Facebook AI Slop,” a cursory inspection of the anti-immigration meme shows that it was obviously conjured up using AI — without any disclosure to viewers.
Take, for instance, the hospital’s “EMERGENCY” sign. AI image models are famously bad at drawing legible words or lettering. Here, the word emergency is technically legible, but the letters are fuzzy and crowded, and certainly don’t look like any hard-edged lettering we’ve ever seen on an emergency building. It almost looks like someone went in with a marker and penciled the letters in.
Speaking of hard lines, the edges of the hospital building are weirdly wavy, and its long windows don’t follow straight lines — more clear sign of AI. For good measure, the buildings in the background have similar problems.
There are also several vehicles pictured in the “photo,” though most of them look melted or otherwise morphed into a comical mess. One vehicle, perhaps supposed to be an ambulance, features completely incomprehensible text on its roof.
Another dead giveaway? The mangled signage painted onto the roads leading up to the hospital. They’re likely meant to depict medical crosses or directional arrows, but look more like poorly-sketched Xs.
And finally, there are the alleged people themselves, all of whom are just distorted, specter-like blobs.
Using AI to drum up a picture like this is a bizarre choice. After all, if you were to go to any stock image site, you could find thousands of images of hospitals. You could find photos of packed emergency rooms, or hospitals with long lines. Why use AI to whip up a fake image instead — and use that completely fabricated image in political content, no less?
It could be that the Trump campaign couldn’t find an image that they thought depicted Scary Immigrant Hospital with the right amount of xenophobia or apocalyptic energy, so they turned to AI instead. Of course, that’s a tacit admission that the crisis they’re warning of isn’t actually happening; if it was, they wouldn’t need to cook up “evidence” using AI. (Needless to say, we’re dying to know what prompt they used, and our tips line is always open.)
Or maybe AI is becoming so normalized in political material by Trump — who, despite calling for anyone who uses AI to be disqualified for “election interference” and “cheating,” has been sharingAI-generated images with increasing frequency — that his campaign no longer thinks anything of it.
Or at least they don’t feel strongly enough to disclose the use of AI to voters. And that feels significant, given that an Artificial Intelligence Policy Institute survey from last fall showed that Americans overwhelmingly believe that AI use in political advertisements should be transparent.
In any case, given the unreality of elections in an online political age rife with so much misinformation, employing AI to fabricate imagined, partisan-driven American realities is a slippery slope — and a Pandora’s Box that the Trump campaign has decided to crowbar wide open.
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