When You Enlarge This “Photo,” Trump Posted,

You’ll Discover An Odd Observation

Donald Trump, a former president and current presidential candidate, posted a series of racist and xenophobic remarks about immigration on social media over the weekend. The posts used the campaign’s official “VOTE TRUMP 2024” logo.

One of the pictures, at the very least, wasn’t what it seemed. The image displays a dilapidated-looking hospital with the word “EMERGENCY” scribbled over its facade in crooked red letters. One may see a lengthy line of individuals awaiting admission. Massive typos throughout the picture declare that “KAMALA HARRIS PLEDGED FREE HEALTHCARE FOR ILLEGALS.” It then adds, very menacingly, “THEY’RE COMING TO COLLECT.”

Put another way, the picture is intended to show a wave of undocumented immigrants swarming to take advantage of the renownedly free healthcare system in America. However, upon closer inspection, there appears to be something… strange about the picture.
As observed by the X user “Insane Facebook AI Slop,” the anti-immigration meme was clearly created using artificial intelligence (AI) without providing any notice to the audience.

For example, consider the “EMERGENCY” sign at the hospital. AI picture models are notoriously poor at creating readable letters or words. Though the letters are crammed and fuzzily rendered, they do not resemble any hard-edged lettering we have ever seen on an emergency building, even though the word emergency is theoretically readable. It nearly appears as though the letters were penciled in with a marker.

Speaking of hard lines, the hospital building’s big windows don’t follow straight lines and its borders are strangely wavy—two additional obvious indications of AI. Just to be sure, there are comparable issues with the structures in the backdrop.

In the “photo,” there are also a number of cars, however the majority of them appear to have melted or somehow transformed into an absurd jumble. There is one car that appears to be an ambulance, but the writing on the roof is utterly unintelligible.

One more obvious dead giveaway? The damaged signs that were sprayed on the roads leading to the medical facility. Though they resemble badly drawn Xs, they are probably intended to represent directing arrows or medical crosses.

And finally, there are the alleged people themselves, all of whom are just distorted, specter-like blobs.

Using AI to drum up a picture like this is a bizarre choice. After all, if you were to go to any stock image site, you could find thousands of images of hospitals. You could find photos of packed emergency rooms, or hospitals with long lines. Why use AI to whip up a fake image instead — and use that completely fabricated image in political content, no less?

Perhaps the Trump campaign went to AI because they were unable to locate an image that they felt captured Scary Immigrant Hospital with the appropriate level of bigotry or apocalyptic fury. Naturally, that’s an implicit acknowledgment that the catastrophe they’re announcing isn’t real; otherwise, they wouldn’t have to fabricate “evidence” with artificial intelligence. (Sincerely, our tips line is always open, and we’re itching to know what prompt they used.)

Perhaps artificial intelligence is becoming so commonplace in political content because of Trump, who, in spite of his calls for anyone caught using AI to be disqualified for “election interference” and “cheating,” has been distributing AI-generated imagery more and more, to the point where his campaign is no longer concerned about it.

Alternatively, they don’t feel strongly enough to tell voters that AI is being used. And that seems important, considering that the majority of Americans, according to a survey conducted by the Artificial Intelligence Policy Institute last autumn, think that artificial intelligence should be transparently used in political marketing.

In any case, using AI to create imagined, partisan-driven American realities is a slippery slope that the Trump team has opted to open wide, especially considering the unreality of elections in an online political age riddled with so much misinformation.