Presidential hopeful Donald Trump made an extraordinary suggestion that a photo of him and E. Jean Carroll — the writer he was found liable for sexually abusing and defaming — was AI-generated.
Trump was speaking to the media on Friday after appearing in a Manhattan federal appeals court where his legal team was fighting to overturn the verdict handed down to him last year.
The Republican nominee brought up the photo of him and Carroll showing Trump with his then-wife Ivana Trump in conversation with Carroll and her then-husband John Johnson, taken at an NBC party. Carroll says she thinks the photo was taken in 1987, which is damning to Trump’s case because he previously claimed he had never met Carroll.
“I never met the woman, other than this picture — which could’ve been AI-generated, I don’t know, showed up out of nowhere. But it’s fine, nice picture,” Trump told the assembled media.
Trump suggests that a photo of him and E Jean Carroll together “could’ve been AI generated” (it is not AI generated) pic.twitter.com/VjIjx6YAsN
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 6, 2024
‘Implausible’
The former president’s casual suggestion that the photo is AI-generated is highly unlikely because the photograph was published in a 2019 New York magazine article — years before AI image generators could produce legible images.
Although artificial intelligence software has been creating art since the 1970s, it wasn’t until just a few years ago when researchers had a breakthrough with the latent diffusion technique that made high-quality AI images widely available.
In 2019, there were AI image generators that could recreate a human’s face but they would not have been able to synthesize a coherent image of multiple people such as the one showing Trump and Carroll. Asking a text-to-image model from 2019 to make such a picture would be littered with the types of inconsistencies and artifacts associated with early AI pictures.
“Given that this image has been circulating for more than five years — when generative AI was still in its most nascent stage — the claim that this is AI-generated is, at best, implausible,” Hany Farid, a Berkeley professor specializing in digital forensics, tells CNN. “In addition, there is nothing in this photo that would suggest that it is AI generated in terms of visual artifacts.”
Trump and AI Images
AI imagery has certainly entered the president’s consciousness after previously claiming that crowds at Democratic rival Kamala Harris’ Michigan rally were AI-generated.
Trump has also posted AI images of Harris as a communist and has taken to leaning on the technology to communicate his message to voters.