Former President Donald Trump on Sunday falsely accused his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, of using artificial intelligence to create a larger crowd at a campaign rally on Wednesday near Detroit, Michigan.
“Did anyone notice Kamala cheated at the airport? There was nobody on the plane and she edited it with 'AI' to make it look like a horde of so called followers but they didn't exist! An airport maintenance worker noticed the fake crowd photo and called Kamala out but there was nobody there. It was later confirmed by the mirror-like finish of the VP plane being visible,” the former reality TV star posted on her social media platform, Truth Social, on Sunday.
“She's a fraud. The 'crowd' looked like 10,000 people when no one was waiting! The same thing happened with the fake 'crowd' at her speech. Democrats cheat to win elections.”
“Look, we caught her with a fake 'crowd'. There was no one there!” Trump added in a later post.
Soon after, he also posted, “Everything Kamala related is FAKE!”
The twice-impeached Republican presidential candidate seems obsessed with the notion of crowd size, echoing the views of conservative commentator Chuck Callest, who has 37,500 followers on Truth social and 765,000 on X (formerly Twitter), and who has previously made false claims online that went viral.
People attend a campaign rally for Vice President Kamala Harris and running mate Tim Walz in Romulus, Michigan on Wednesday.
Katie McTiernan/Anadolu via Getty Images
The campaigns of Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, fired back in posts on X, claiming the photos from the rally were real.
“1) This is an actual photo of a crowd of 15,000 supporting Harris-Waltz in Michigan,” the post read, using figures that matched a Thursday report from local news outlet MLive. “2) Trump hasn't campaigned in a battleground state in over a week… is he down?”
The campaign also posted a video showing the full crowd on Truth Social, along with a warning: “WARNING: Content in this video may offend @realDonaldTrump.”
Early on in her presidential campaign, Harris fell victim to the use of artificial intelligence when the audio in her campaign videos was replaced with a sound-alike voice that said something completely different to what was said in the actual videos.
“I, Kamala Harris, am your Democratic candidate for president because Joe Biden finally showed his senility in the debate,” the voice in the video said.
Trump himself has been at the mercy of misinformation spread by AI-generated images. In March 2023, images created by a tool called Midjourney v5 surfaced online depicting a dramatic fight between Trump and a number of New York police officers. (Trump, who has now been convicted, was not arrested until August 2023.)
By contrast, in a June interview with YouTuber and pro wrestler Logan Paul, the former president bragged that he had used AI to create a “beautiful” speech (it's unclear if and when the speech was used).
