Amid rumours that Donald Trump is set to be arrested this week, several AI-generated images of the former President being chased and manhandled by police have gone viral.
The photos do look impressively realistic, to be fair (well, aside from the one where he’s sprinting from the police – there’s no way Trump is physically capable of running, is there?):
The photos come as Trump is expected to be indicted by the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office in its investigation of hush money payments made to porn star Stormy Daniels over their (alleged) affair. In a Truth Social post over the weekend, Trump announced that he expected to be arrested on Tuesday and called for protests in response. Well Tuesday has come and gone and he hasn’t been arrested, so who knows what the hell is going on.
They’ve even managed to generate photos of Trump in prison:
And escaping, even…
Of course the worrying thing about this is how many people out there will see images like these while scrolling through their timelines and be fooled into thinking they’re legit, which makes the whole issue of fake news and disinformation a problem that’s only going to get bigger as we move forward and AI improves even further. You could literally make a deepfake video of Trump confessing his crimes right now, share it online, and a whole bunch of people will believe it’s the real deal. One day we’ll even be able to make videos like that of each other using an app on our phones. You can already imagine the dramas that’s going to cause.
Well anyway, we’ll have to wait and see if anything develops regarding Trump’s arrest this week. He may even be in handcuffs by the time you read this…