POV: Trump is making false claims about Kamala Harris using AI—and he’s playing with fire

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Size matters, and it matters to Donald Trump more than anything else. Trump kicked off his presidency by exaggerating the number of people who attended his inauguration; now, he wants to reduce the crowds that will come in 2024 against him.

Over the weekend, the former president posted on Truth Social unedited comments about the large crowds at Vice President Kamala Harris’ recent rally. But instead of simply attributing the high turnout to tourist spots favored by Megan Thee Stallion, as he has done in the past, Trump went further and said that the Harris campaign is using AI to build large crowds digitally. (As evidence, he offered a tweet from a right-wing strategist, which has been publicly noted to be ignored.) Trump’s claim sent an unmistakable signal to fans not to trust their lying eyes about Harris’ popularity, and the message immediately. appeared on TikTok. It’s something both he and those supporters may soon regret.

Just before Trump’s post over the weekend on Truth Social, he had been holding back about powerful people appearing at Harris meetings. He spent an ill-advised length of time last week reiterating the size of his crowd at a press conference that quickly gathered, culminating in the burning of pants that said the presence of his speech on January 6, 2021, reduced the crowds that turned up. except for Martin Luther King Jr.’s speech. “I have a dream” speech.

The growing accusation of Harris for digitally manipulating the crowd image is the latest, and perhaps most important, evidence of how much the Democrat pivot from President Biden to VP Harris has boosted the Trump campaign.

Until recently, the difference in crowd size between the candidates at the top of each ticket was a red-hot data point that confirmed a large enthusiasm gap. Biden hasn’t been putting his campaign events well together, even before the disastrous debate that caused him to drop out of the race. In contrast to Trump’s supporters, many of whom are fired up about the candidate, a June CBS/YouGov poll found that most Democratic voters were fired up about a Trump victory. The support of Biden himself made it easier for Trump to claim, but again, that the only way he can lose is if his opponent cheats.

“If everything is honest, I would happily accept the results,” Trump said Milwaukee Journal Sentinel back in May. “If not, you must fight for the right of the country.”

Fox News brought up Trump’s allegations of imminent cheating as Biden continued to play down the Democratic Party’s hopes of victory, when host Greg Gutfeld asked in June: [Biden wins,] How do you convince someone that it is true?”

Now that Trump is running against a legitimately popular opponent himself—or at least one who has benefited greatly from innovation and innovation—the enthusiasm gap looks like a closed pothole. With Harris drawing crowds of 15,000 or more to his events, Trump no longer has a charisma-vacuum counterpart to point to as the elusive winner. Complaining that the crowds were turning on tent guests like Megan Thee Stallion wasn’t getting much traction—perhaps because it was an admission that people actually succeeded—so now Trump has found the perfect way to account for those crowds: AI.

The rapidly developing AI space has given us the opportunity to discredit this election, but mostly in the form of people passing off AI images as real. The hype surrounding text-to-image generators like DALL-E and Midjourney has left us unprepared to respond to hoaxes that try to pass off real images as AI. Many Trump supporters may easily believe claims that the apparent confirmation of a negative truth is actually a lie. As scary as it may be to think what the guy who once changed the path of a hurricane with a Sharpie could do with the latest AI capabilities, it turns out that Trump doesn’t even need them to turn AI into a weapon.

AI seems ready to be Trump’s “fake news”. For nearly a decade now, his use of the latter phrase is enough to end any reported story in the eyes of his followers. Many of them still believe that the 2020 election was stolen, that Trump never said there were “very good people on both sides” of the deadly Charlottesville rally, and that many of the charges against him were unwarranted political attacks. Given that context, it’s not far-fetched to believe that Harris’ campaign will change some images.

Until this past weekend, many Trump supporters seemed to believe that the Harris hype was in its honeymoon phase and would soon blow over. Now, Trump has given them permission to disbelieve that the hype ever existed.

Unfortunately for Trump, if his supporters buy into these latest lies, it could hurt him too.

Most of Trump’s supporters seem to be living by the book right now. For example, some conservative pundits say that Tim Walz was so hurt by the Republican attacks that he may be about to drop out, when in fact none of these attacks stopped Walz from enjoying a successful discharge. Living within the info-environment that Walz is already neutral in will leave some Trump supporters unprepared for what may come in November. Some of them may believe that Harris is so unpopular that a Trump victory is guaranteed, and that they can sit comfortably at home on election day.

If Trump’s book-dwelling supporters actually suppress the vote, though, it would be a perfect book for his political career. After all, part of the reason Trump was elected in the first place was because Hillary Clinton’s supporters were living in a bubble. And as Mark Twain famously said, history doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.

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