From CNN
DeSantis campaign posts fake images of Trump hugging Fauci in social media video
By Steve Contorno and Donie O'Sullivan
The presidential campaign for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis released a video on social media that appears to use images generated by artificial intelligence to depict former President Donald Trump hugging Dr. Anthony Fauci.
The images were included in a video posted Monday that first shows Trump as host of the reality TV show “The Apprentice” firing people and then pivots to sound bites of Trump praising Fauci and explaining why he could not fire the former head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. At one point, the audio is laid over pictures of Trump and Fauci, including several of the two men appearing to embrace. The words “Real Life Trump” are transposed over the images...
Hany Farid, a digital forensic expert and a professor at the University of California, Berkeley’s School of Information, agreed that the images in the ad were AI-generated, noting the nonsensical text in the image supposedly from the briefing room.
“This type of semantic inconsistency is still a weakness of generative AI,” Farid said. “These problems, however, will eventually get resolved and we can expect generative-AI images to become increasingly more difficult to distinguish from reality. This is not the first use of generative AI in the upcoming election, and it certainly won’t be the last. Buckle up...”
Hany Farid is a professor at the UC Berkeley School of Information and EECS. He specializes in digital forensics.
