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So realistic that they seem real

The fake photos of Trump's arrest: the incredible sequence created with artificial intelligence

Elliot Higgins, founder of the investigative journalism platform Bellingcat, made artificial intelligence imagine various moments of the arrest of the former President and posted them on social media where they went viral.

23/03/2023

Elliot Higgins, founder of the investigative journalism platform Bellingcat, made artificial intelligence imagine various moments of the arrest of former US President Donald Trump and posted them on social media, where they went viral, sparking an uproar. Here is the tycoon while he escapes hunted by the police or behind the bars of a cell; in orange prison jumpsuits or in the dock crying.

The hypothesis of Trump's arrest, pending the verdict of the Grand Jury for the-gate, has aroused the interest of the public. And Elliott Higgins went so far as to have artificial intelligence imagine several moments of a shutdown to understand how far the complexity of AI reasoning can go.

The journalist used Midjourney, a powerful software that can create images from text descriptions. "I tried a lot of different suggestions to see what the software could do and how complex the images would be," he told BuzzFeed News. He probably didn't expect to raise a fuss: "I was just joking. I thought maybe only five people would retweet them," he explained in an interview after being sanctioned by Midjourney.

Instead, the web went wild and two days later his Twitter posts describing an event that never happened were viewed 5 million times, creating a case study on the increasing sophistication of images generated by artificial intelligence and the ease with which they can create confusion in a volatile information world, feeding fake news, conspiracy theories and generally distrust from the public in everything they see. The episode also highlights the absence of corporate standards or government regulations that address the use of artificial intelligence to create and spread falsehoods, at a time when web giants are challenging each other on this terrain.