Taylor Swift fans aren't supporting Donald Trump in droves, Kamala Harris didn't stand in front of a hammer and sickle and speak to a horde of communists at the Democratic National Convention, and Hillary Clinton wasn't recently spotted walking around Chicago wearing a MAGA hat, but the photos of all of this exist.
In recent weeks, far-right corners of social media have been awash with such depictions, created with generative AI tools. They are instantly recognizable because they have the technology’s distinctive image style: not quite photorealistic, but nearly so, and often outrageous, not so different from tabloid illustrations. Donald Trump (at least the person who manages his social media accounts) posted an AI-generated photo of Harris holding a hammer and sickle, as well as a series of fake images of Taylor Swift dressed as Uncle Sam and young women marching in Swifty for Trump shirts. (This came after Trump falsely claimed Harris had posted “AI-generated” images, a product of elaborate projection.)
Trump himself has been the subject of generative AI art, sharing images of himself dating back to March 2023. He is often seen as a cowboy with a gun or storming a beach in a World War II uniform. But these are mundane compared to the bulk of the material created and shared by far-right influencers and scumbags. Images mocking and insulting Harris and other female Democratic politicians, such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, are plentiful. On X, a post containing a fake image implying Harris is a sex worker has been viewed more than 3.5 million times, while the same post has been shared more than 87,000 times on Facebook. A pro-Trump Elon Musk fanboy account recently shared a provocative image of Harris in a revealing outfit surrounded by multiple Donald Trump clones, which has been viewed 1.6 million times. Images and videos show Harris and Trump holding hands on a beach and Harris wearing a crown that reads “Inflation Queen.” On the first night of the Democratic National Convention, MAGA influencers like Catturd2 and Jack Posobiec accompanied angry tweets about the Democratic Party with stylized AI images of enraged Tim Walz and Joe Biden.
While no one ideology has a monopoly on AI art, it seems that high-resolution, low-budget AI-generated imagery is fusing with the meme-loving aesthetic of the MAGA movement. At least in the social media swamp of enthusiasm, AI art is becoming MAGA-coded. The Republican Party is becoming the party of AI filth.
AI troll content is not inherently political. Its most pervasive presence on platforms like Facebook has been in the form of elaborate networks of clickfarmers and spammers flooding pages and groups with cheesy, fake images of starving children or Shrimp Jesus in the hopes of going viral, garnering likes, and earning “creator bonuses” for online engagement. Jason Kabler, a tech reporter who has spent the past year investigating Facebook’s AI troll economy, describes the deluge of synthetic images as part of a “zombie internet” and the “end of shared reality,” with “a mix of bots, humans, and once-human-but-no-longer-human accounts forming miserable websites with few social connections.”
What's happening on the MAGA internet isn't exactly the same as the Facebook spam landscape, but the vibe is similar. MAGA influencers may be posting AI photos as a hobby, but they're also engaging in engagement farming. X, in particular, allows premium subscribers to opt into the platform's revenue-sharing program. Right-wing influencers have been vocal about these bonuses, which are paid out based on how many times a creator's content is viewed in a given month. “The payouts were huge. They're just getting bigger,” Catturd2 posted in March of this year, praising Musk.
Many of these influencers already have sizable followings, but AI image generators are giving dedicated contributors what they need most: cheap, fast, on-demand content. Instead of typing out a few lines complaining about Biden's age or mocking Harris' economic policies, far-right contributors can portray attacks to gain more attention. And it's getting easier. Last week, X rolled out the latest version of its generative AI engine, Grok, which has fewer guardrails than competing models and is already churning out countless illustrations of disadvantaged celebrities and politicians.
It’s helpful to think of these photos and illustrations not as malicious deepfakes or overly convincing propaganda, but as digital bait: campaign shrimp Jesus. So far, little (if any) of what’s being generated is convincing enough to fool voters, and most of it is used to confirm the preconceptions of true believers. Still, the deluge of AI-generated political images is a pollutant in the broader online information ecosystem. This AI trash doesn’t just exist in the vacuum of certain social networks; it leaves a kind of ecological footprint on the web. Images are created, copied, shared, embedded on websites, and indexed by search engines. In the future, AI art tools could study these distorted depictions to create distorted, digitally incestuous representations of historical figures. The fact that such a large amount of fake images can be generated so quickly adds another layer of unreality to the internet. You and I, like voters around the world, must wade through layers of this junk, exhaustingly sifting between the obviously fake, the real thing and everything fuzzy in between.
In many ways, political smut seems the logical end point of these image generators, the most convenient for those looking to make a quick buck. What once required skill, or at least time, to create something interesting enough to grab attention in photography, illustration, and graphic design can now be translated into real money online. Now the market is flooded with free or easily available tools. What once required skilled labor is now spam run by tools trained on the work of real artists and photographers. Spam is annoying, but ultimately easy to ignore. That is, until it collides with the negative incentives of social media platforms and is used by political scumbags and charlatans. Then the images turn into something else. In Trump's hands, they create mini news cycles and stories that are debunked. In the hands of influencers, they are sporadically released onto our timelines to garner just a little attention. Like Facebook's AI slop farms, social media shock jocks churn out obviously fake, low-quality images and don't care if they offend real people, bore them, or make them fodder for bots and other spammers. Engagement for engagement's sake. Thoughtlessly generated information clogs our information pathways and forces consumers to do the work of discarding it.
It's no surprise that these tools are the medium of choice for Trump's political campaign. After years of crafting an alternate reality with a never-ending web of lies, it's only natural that a politician would be drawn to a technology that can rewrite history to his advantage with a simple command. It's no wonder that Trump's most ardent supporters — an online group that has embraced conspiracy theories and election denialism to the point that some of its members stormed the Capitol — would rejoice in custom memes and crude depictions of AI art. The MAGA movement has spent nine years building a coalition of conspiracy-minded, hyper-partisan conspiracists dedicated to creating a fictional information universe to encase them in. Now they can describe it.
