Image of Donald Trump leading crowd down flag-lined street is AI-generated | Fact check
The claim: Image shows Trump leading large crowd down flag-lined street
A March 6 Facebook post (direct link, archive link) appears to show a massive crowd of people following former President Donald Trump down a street lined with American flags.
“America stands with Trump,” reads the text in the image.
It was shared more than 1,000 times in eight days.
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The image was generated by artificial intelligence, according to two computer science experts and an AI-detection tool.
AI-generated image ‘not consistent with the physical world’
A version of the image was first posted to social media the day before Trump's April 2023 arraignment in New York and was shared by Eric Trump. It circulated again 11 months later as the former president secured the presumptive Republican presidential nomination by earning enough delegates in state caucuses and primary elections.
The original image is in crisper focus than the one posted to Facebook, and it includes a watermark in the lower-right corner that identifies the social media user who originally shared it. In the more recent version, Trump is the only person in focus. It was cropped to remove the watermark but includes the logo of the pro-Trump apparel retailer that shared the image.
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"The images are definitely the output of generative AI," James O’Brien, a computer science professor at the University of California, Berkeley, told USA TODAY in an email.
The original also contains several hallmarks of AI-generated images that are less prominent in the more recent version, Walter Scheirer, an associate professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Notre Dame, told USA TODAY in an email.
Many of the people in the crowd – including a man in a beige hat behind the car on the left and another in a light blue shirt behind Trump’s right shoulder – have features that are “deformed in a highly unnatural way,” Scheirer said. Additionally, the stars on many of the flags are arranged in incorrect patterns, and several flags have the wrong number of stars.
“Overall, the image is in a cartoon-style that is not consistent with the physical world, but is very popular on the Internet – especially for political image generation,” Scheirer said.
USA TODAY ran both versions of the image through the online AI detection tool Hive Moderation. It reports the high-resolution original version is 99.9% likely to be AI-generated – and is 99.9% likely to have been created with the program Midjourney. For the version in the Facebook post, the likelihood that it is an AI creation drops to 85.8%, the detection tool determined.
The version posted to Facebook “looks lower quality to me, perhaps due to compression and resizing,” Scheirer said. “That might have been intentional to obscure the visible artifacts, or an unintentional consequence of uploading the photo to a different platform with its own image-processing algorithms.”
Trump has been at the center of several false claims involving AI-generated images. USA TODAY has fact-checked fabricated images of the former president dancing with a teenage girl, being arrested by law enforcement and posing for a mugshot.
PolitiFact also debunked the claim, and Forbes in April 2023 also concluded that AI was used to create the original image.
Our fact-check sources:
Walter Scheirer, March 14, Email exchange with USA TODAY
James O’Brien, March 14, Email exchange with USA TODAY
Hive Moderation (Internet Archive), March 14, Trump Orig AI Detector
Hive Moderation (Internet Archive), March 14, Trump Facebook AI Detector
Smithsonian, accessed March 14, Facts about the United States Flag
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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: AI behind image of Trump leading crowd down a street | Fact check