The MAGA meme is being reborn.
Illustration: The Atlantic. Source: Getty.
August 23, 2024 5:16 PM ET
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The age of generative AI propaganda has arrived. Last week, Donald Trump published fabricated images on his social media accounts of Kamala Harris addressing a crowd of uniformed communists with a hammer and sickle, Taylor Swift dressed as Uncle Sam, and young women wearing “Swifties for Trump” T-shirts. Other far-right influencers have also published their own AI images portraying Harris in a sexually degrading context or praising Trump.
As my colleague Charlie Warzel wrote in The Atlantic , “While no single ideology has a monopoly on AI art, it seems that high-resolution, low-budget AI-generated imagery is merging with the meme-loving aesthetic of the MAGA movement. At least in the morass of social media frenzy, AI art is becoming MAGA-coded.”
These images are, in effect, an evolution of the memes that have long fueled the far-right, but now you don't need even rudimentary Photoshop skills to create them: Simply plug the prompt into an image generator, and within seconds you'll have a fairly realistic JPEG ready to enjoy in your posts.
“It's no surprise that these tools have been the vehicles of choice for Trump's political campaign,” Charlie wrote. “After years of crafting an alternate reality with an endless web of lies, it's only natural that a politician would be attracted to technology that allows him to rewrite history to suit his own purposes with a simple command.”
Illustration: Ben Coté/The Atlantic. Credit: Getty.
The MAGA aesthetic is a stain on AI
Charlie Warzel
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…
This AI bastard doesn't just exist in the vacuum of a particular social network. It leaves a sort 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 and create distorted digitized representations of historical figures. The sheer volume and rapid creation of fake images adds a sense of unreality to the internet.
Read the full article.
What to read next
Silicon Valley is vehemently opposed to the AI Safety Bill. This week, my colleague Caroline Mims Nice spoke with California Senator Scott Wiener. Wiener is seeking to impose regulations on advanced AI models, but he faces stiff opposition not only from tech companies but also from other Democrats, including Nancy Pelosi. “Opponents argue that this bill focuses on 'sci-fi risks,'” Wiener says. “They say that people who support this bill are pessimistic and crazy. This bill is not about Terminator risks. This bill is about very specific, significant harm.”
P.S.
Speaking of sci-fi, I'm going to see Alien: Romulus tonight. Journalist Fran Hoepfner, writing for The Atlantic about the film and the larger franchise it's a part of, said, “Alien movies have always tapped into excitingly pessimistic visions of a future dominated by capitalism and genetic experimentation, but they're also movies about humans defeating monsters — by shooting them, setting them on fire, hurling them out a sealed door into space.” Looks like a good Friday night for me.
Damon
