A new report by BBC Panorama found that AI-generated images of Black people seemingly endorsing Donald are proliferating online among MAGA supporters. The AI-generated images can look exceptionally real, but they are as phony as a Trump-dollar bill. According to the report, there is “no evidence directly linking these images to Mr. Trump’s campaign,” but the motivation for such imagery is suspicious, to say the least.
One of the image creators is a conservative radio host in Florida named Mark Kaye, whose team shared on Facebook their fake image of a group of Black women and others with Trump at a holiday party. His account has more than 1 million followers. According to the BBC, Kaye’s image was posted alongside an article about Black voters supporting Trump.
While that image could definitely fool someone, it has many of the trademark errors of AI-generated images, including hands with missing or misshapen fingers. And even for those who don’t notice those rendering errors, the photo gives a surreal feeling—from the sheen on people’s skin to the proportions of people in the room and the angle of the supposed photograph.
“I’m not out there taking pictures of what’s really happening. I’m a storyteller,” Kaye told the media outlet.
What “story” is the right-wing radio host creating? He doesn’t explicitly say. But it isn’t hard to see how white MAGA voters might like to believe in the fantasy that “nobody has done more for Black Americans than” Trump has. After all, Trump even seems to believe it.
In the end, the biggest problem the Republican Party and Donald Trump have in inspiring Black voters is … the Republican Party and Donald Trump. During the weekend of this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference, where Republicans mingled with actual neo-Nazis, Trump tried to woo Black audiences at the Black Conservative Federation Gala, saying, “And you know who embraced [my mug shot] more than anybody else: the Black population.”
When Trump and his Republican Party got spanked by Joe Biden in the 2020 election, Black voters supported Biden at virtually the same rates they had supported Hillary Clinton in 2016. Any inroads into the Black community Trump made continue to be a figment of Trump and his AI-generating fanbase’s imagination.
As for these fake AI-generated images? Some of the fakes are easy to spot, like this one where one of the men has three arms.
Others are not. Here’s a group of fake young men hanging on a stoop with the disgraced former president (One giveaway is the question: What is the young man on the right sitting on?).
The MAGA movement has always been a cult, and the level of self-delusion needed to maintain a belief against all facts grows as reality comes crashing down. These fantasy images, while clearly deceptive, are also the sad consolations of folks who so badly don’t want to believe they support white supremacy that they are creating pretend Black friends for him.
Simon Rosenberg from the Hopium Chronicles Substack is back to talk about the facts of the 2024 election cycle. The facts are: Things look bad for Donald Trump—and even worse for the Republican Party.
