Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast/Reuters
The photos are evocative. Former President Donald Trump is yelling, writhing, fighting as he’s detained by police. A swarm of officers surrounds him. His youngest wife and eldest son scream in protest. He’s in a mist—is that pepper spray?—as he charges across the pavement.
The photos are also … off. The pepper spray emerges, ex nihilo, from behind Trump’s head and in front of his chest. Behind him, a storefront sign says “WORTRKE.” In one image, a cop’s arm is outside its empty sleeve. In another, Trump has only half a torso. The officers’ badges are all gibberish. “PIULIECE” reads a cop’s hat behind a grotesque Melania Trump-like creature from uncanny valley.
All of this, you see, is fake. The photos are not photos at all but deepfakes, the work of generative AI. They’re a digital unreality created by Midjourney, a program similar to the better-known DALL-E 2 image generator and GPT-4 chatbot. And, for American politics, they’re a portend of things to come.