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The 2024 election cycle is the first in which the political world has had to confront questions about the use of artificial intelligence. It’s already come up on multiple occasions, and in provocative ways.
Nearly a year ago, for example, the Republican National Committee launched an attack video targeting President Joe Biden that included AI-created images. A few months later, Gov. Ron DeSantis’ campaign targeted Donald Trump using “deepfakes” generated by artificial intelligence.
In January, someone used artificial intelligence to impersonate Biden for a robocall. As recently as last week, as my MSNBC colleague Ja’han Jones noted, Trump supporters were caught using artificial intelligence to generate images of the former president “appearing friendly with nonexistent Black people.”
Such tactics, naturally, have generated some confusion. Voters have new reasons to be skeptical of what they’re seeing and hearing, unsure whether it’s legitimate or created by a computer.
It’s uncertainty that Donald Trump is apparently eager to exploit. Consider this item the former president published to his social media platform overnight:
“The Hur Report was revealed today! A disaster for Biden, a two tiered standard of justice. Artificial Intelligence was used by them against me in their videos of me. Can’t do that Joe!”
Right off the bat, let’s note that former special counsel Robert Hur’s findings were not a “disaster” for the incumbent Democratic president. Let’s also note that the idea of “a two-tiered standard of justice” has been thoroughly discredited.
But it was that other part of Trump’s missive that stood out.
What the Republican was referring to was a House Judiciary Committee hearing with Hur in which Democratic members expected a lot of discussion about Biden’s age, occasional gaffes, and the prosecutor’s gratuitous commentary about the president’s memory.
In response, some of the panel’s Democratic members prepared visual evidence of Trump’s cognitive lapses, as part of a “two can play at this game” strategy.
The point, obviously, was unsubtle. If Biden’s occasional slips are going to be perceived as disqualifying, Democrats effectively suggested, then the public ought to know about Trump’s occasional slips, too.
The former president could’ve simply ignored all of this and hoped that the clips went unnoticed. Instead, he drew fresh attention to the video montage and claimed that Democrats relied on “artificial intelligence.”
But this was, and is, the dumbest of all possible strategies. The videos of Trump’s cognitive slip-ups are entirely real. They were not manipulated with A.I. or through any other means.
By pushing this defense, Trump is simultaneously (a) lying, (b) drawing attention to videos he should hope voters don’t see; and (c) implicitly suggesting that the clips are so humiliating that they couldn’t possibly be real, except they are, in fact, genuine and unaltered.