Donald Trump promoted a wave of false claims on social media that his rival Kamala Harris used artificial intelligence to create images of her supporters at a Michigan rally last week — an allegation proven false by photographs and video.
The Republican presidential candidate wrote in the first of a series of posts on his Truthout social platform on Sunday, “Did anyone see that Kamala cheated at the airport? There was no one on the plane, and she did ‘AI’, and showed a huge ‘crowd’ of so-called followers, but they did not exist!”
“There was no one there!” he wrote in another post.
Live footage and images from multiple media outlets, including AFP, showed crowds of supporters who flocked to the airport hangar to see Harris and her newly-announced vice presidential candidate, Tim Walz.
The photo appears to have been first posted by a Harris campaign official, who received it from another staffer.
“This is an actual photo of a crowd of 15,000 people for Harris-Walz in Michigan,” the campaign’s official rapid response page wrote on the social media platform X.
The campaign shared an original copy of the image — which appears blurrier than the high-exposure version available online and that Trump highlighted — with the BBC, telling the British broadcaster that it had “not been modified by AI in any way.”
Matthew Stamm, a digital forensics expert at Drexel University, analyzed the image for AFP and said his specialized software “found no evidence that the image was generated by AI.”
Hany Farid, also of the University of California-Berkeley, told AFP that two models designed to identify AI traces found no evidence the technology was used in the image.
The false claim circulated on right-wing and conspiratorial social media, before reaching Trump, who shared a post by conservative commentator Chuck Callesto that focused on the lack of reflection of the crowd on the side of the plane.
Experts said the image of the crowd may not have appeared straight because of the distance between the plane and the spectators and the angle of the reflection.
“The reflection off the aircraft’s fuselage and engines would show the ground just in front of the plane,” Stamm told AFP.
The Trump campaign did not respond to requests for comment.
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