Former President Donald Trump baselessly accused Vice President Kamala Harris of using artificial intelligence to make the size of a rally crowd look larger than it was.
“Has anyone noticed that Kamala CHEATED at the airport?” Trump wrote on Truth Social, pointing to an August 7th image of a Michigan tarmac showing Air Force Two and a large wave of people with Harris-Walz signs. “There was nobody at the plane, and she ‘A.I.’d’ it, and showed a massive ‘crowd’ of so-called followers, BUT THEY DIDN’T EXIST!”
Local news site MLive wrote that the rally at Detroit Metro Airport hosted about 15,000 people, with “the crowd spilling out onto the tarmac and cheering as Air Force Two arrived.” Other angles show large crowds, and the fact-checking site Snopes even ran the image Trump amplified through AI-detection tools, which said it was likely a real image.
While social media platforms are racing to figure out how to combat actual AI deception and distinguish it from ordinary retouching, Trump is using the tech’s existence as an easy way to discredit reality. It’s a tactic with years of precedent at this point. In 2021, a judge allowed the attorney of Kyle Rittenhouse — the then-teenager who shot three men in Kenosha, Wisconsin in the midst of protests against police violence — to claim using pinch-to-zoom on an iPad video would manipulate the footage with AI. Elon Musk’s lawyers made a less successful version of the “AI’d” argument last year, claiming Musk’s past statements about Tesla safety might have been “‘deepfake’ videos.”
The AI accusation is also part of a recent line of attack against Democrats, claiming that the last-minute switch of candidates from President Joe Biden to Harris is wrong. Trump’s Truth Social post claims Harris “should be disqualified because the creation of a fake image is ELECTION INTERFERENCE.” (In reality, agencies are still figuring out how to regulate AI-generated political ads.)
In a post on X Sunday, the Harris campaign shared a post from Trump accusing them of creating a “fake ‘crowd.’” “1) This is an actual photo of a 15,000-person crowd for Harris-Walz in Michigan,” the Harris campaign wrote. “2) Trump has still not campaigned in a swing state in over a week… Low energy?”
