People Aren't Falling for AI Trump Photos (Yet)

On Monday, as Americans considered the possibility of a Donald Trump indictment and a presidential perp walk, Eliot Higgins brought the hypothetical to life. Higgins, the founder of Bellingcat, an open-source investigations group, asked the latest version of the generative-AI art tool Midjourney to illustrate the spectacle of a Trump arrest. It pumped out vivid photos of a sea of police officers dragging the 45th president to the ground. He generated a series of images that became more and more absurd: Donald Trump Jr. and Melania Trump screaming at a throng of arresting officers; Trump weeping in the courtroom, pumping iron with his fellow prisoners, mopping a jailhouse latrine, and eventually breaking out of prison through a sewer on a rainy evening. The story, which Higgins tweeted over the course of two days, ends with Trump crying at a McDonald's in his orange jumpsuit. All of the tweets are compelling, but only the scene of Trump's arrest went mega viral, garnering 5.7 million views as of this morning.