From France24
Fake celebrity endorsements, snubs plague US presidential race
Dozens of bogus testimonies from American actors, singers and athletes about Republican nominee Trump and his Democratic rival Kamala Harris have proliferated on social media ahead of the November election, researchers say, many of them enabled by artificial intelligence image generators.
The fake endorsements and brushoffs, which come as platforms such as the Elon Musk-owned X knock down many of the guardrails against misinformation, have prompted concern over their potential to manipulate voters as the race to the White House heats up...
The photos -- including some that Hany Farid, a digital forensics expert at the University of California, Berkeley, said bore the hallmarks of AI-generated images -- suggested the pop star and her fans, popularly known as Swifties, backed Trump’s campaign.
What made Trump’s mash-up on Truth Social “particularly devious” was its combination of real and fake imagery, Farid told AFP...
Hany Farid is a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Sciences and the School of Information at UC Berkeley.
