After news of the former president’s potential indictment this week, AI-generated deepfakes depicting Donald Trump being detained became viral on Twitter.
Trump was anticipated to be indicted by a grand jury this week on suspicion of making hush payments to porn star Stormy Daniels.
The false photos that journalist Elliot Higgins posted on Twitter have already been seen more than five million times.
Images from the series showed Trump obstructing police before being taken into custody.
The 45th president might be seen attempting to flee in some of the fake images.
The deepfake series also includes some of Melania Trump, along with the former president’s son, Donald Trump Jr protesting the arrest.
Higgins used Midjourney, an artificial intelligence text-to-image generator, to generate the lifelike images.
‘Making pictures of Trump getting arrested while waiting for Trump’s arrest,’ tweeted Higgins, who is also the founder of investigative collective Bellingcat.
Higgings said that, for several images, he submitted the text prompt, ‘Donald Trump falling over while getting arrested. Fibonacci Spiral. News footage’.
The fake images looked eerily real but if you look closely, you can see that the text on the police officers’ uniforms is gibberish, along with distorted faces and hands. These are usually tell-tale signs of AI-generated images.
‘The Trump arrest image was really just casually showing both how good and bad Midjourney was at rendering real scenes like the first image has Trump with three legs and a police belt,’ Higgins told the Associated Press.
‘I had assumed that people would realise Donald Trump has two legs, not three, but that appears not to have stopped some people passing them off as genuine, which highlights that lack of critical thinking skills in our educational system.’
Other AI-generated images depicting Trump’s imaginary arrest, have been doing the rounds on the internet with many people falling for it at first glance.
The incident shows the disturbing power of AI-generated images in perpetuating fake news.
As for Trump, he remains free as he is unlikely to be indicted and arrested this week.