Just a Little Bit Deep Fake, "OK," Right?!

OK, the June 13th arraignment of Donald Trump took place without the numbers of rabble protestors that the ex-president asked to come to Miami when he was arrested and charged with 37 federal criminal counts. But Trump has turned his criminal charges as evidence of the “deep state” – led by communists and Marxists – into a political fund-raising bonanza. And still, the leading GOP presidential candidates continue to underscore how extreme their MAGA platform has become.

The cast of characters in Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ culture war and presidential campaign is extensive and mostly either severely threatened or being prodded to escalating anger. Teachers and librarians in Florida’s less-than-stellar public schools and colleges face being fired under his anti-“woke” legislation, perhaps even prosecuted. For those who believe that DeSantis just does not understand what he is doing, I beg to differ. With a Yale undergraduate degree in history and a Harvard law degree, he knows exactly what he is doing. All stuff that you can find in the various publications from the brutal dictators he has studied. Banning books and punishing those who disagree with him.

With the charisma of lamppost – his seatmate in Congress (a fellow Republican) told a journalist that DeSantis never tried to talk to him for his entire 2-year term – and facing an uphill climb against his heavily favored (so far) opponent, ex-president Trump – DeSantis is long on events and imagery, even if false or manufactured, to prove his is the only “right” way to view America today. He’s not above directing his operatives in Texas to mislead border-crossing asylum seekers into getting on charter flights (paid by Florida taxpayers) in blue states and towns with an unsubstantiated promise of a job and a better life.

As part of his culture war, DeSantis has so vilified Dr Anthony Fauci that the mere mention of the latter’s name produces rightwing snarls and vituperatives. Yet, Dr Anthony Fauci is a retired, dedicated public servant American doctor and scientist who has worked as director of the federal government’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease and was one of the key advisors during the main thrust of the COVID pandemic. Fauci, LGBTQ+ individuals and immigrants are standout “bad guys” in DeSantis’ polarizing messaging.

Using immigrants as if there were non-human pawns and relying on deep fake images that make his opponent look bad, DeSantis has never let truth stand in the way of his political ambitions. Like his deep fakes of Trump kissing Fauci in DeSantis’ campaign materials. See above. “The images appear in a 45-second video published by the DeSantis War Room Twitter account. The video criticizes Trump’s embrace of Fauci during the COVID-19 pandemic. Fauci advocated public shutdowns, mask-wearing, and vaccinations — community-wide measures that angered conservatives. As governor, DeSantis issued orders against all of those measures in his state as the epidemic raged. Florida now ranks third among states with the highest level of COVID-19 cases and related deaths.

“The video begins with dramatic music and footage of Trump repeating his trademark phrase, ‘You’re fired,’ while eliminating contestants from his competitive business-themed reality show, The Apprentice. The music then shifts to a gentle toy piano — the kind played by numerous baby toys — as Trump calls Fauci ‘a wonderful guy’ and repeatedly explains that he couldn’t fire Fauci during his presidency because it would’ve created a ‘firestorm’ on the left…

“The technology website The Verge pointed out that, in the image of Trump kissing Fauci, the positioning of their faces is unnatural. Additionally, the text on the White House seal in the background is rendered in a non-sensical, almost Cyrillic-seeming alphabet. Similar text errors commonly occur in AI-created images since AI software has difficulty recreating legible text… Furthermore, the aforementioned publication noted that it was unable to find any of the three images of the men embracing using a Google reverse image search.” LGBTQNation, June 10th.

Wilfred Chan, writing for the June 10th FastCompany.com, adds: “Placed next to real photographs, the [above] hugging images blend in upon first glance. Only when you look closer do the signs of AI jump out: overly-smooth textures, strangely overlapping faces—is Trump kissing Fauci’s nose?—and gibberish text. Though the creations have since been debunked, they represent examples of an insidious new kind of visual manipulation: high-profile deepfakes that try to camouflage alongside similar-looking but real images.

“Yes, we’ve seen other deepfakes of major subjects go viral in the last few months. But they’ve either been outlandish—like a set of Midjourney-generated images portraying Trump fighting police in the streets before being hauled off to jail—or too low stakes to arouse suspicion, like the AI-generated image of Pope Francis wearing a white Balenciaga-inspired puffer jacket that fooled many viewers in March. There was also the fake photograph last month that purported to show an explosion at the Pentagon, shared by Russian state media but quickly and easily debunked.

“The DeSantis campaign’s deepfakes feel like a more dangerous use of generative AI. Unlike other headline-grabbing AI images, the images weren’t designed to shock; they largely sought to confirm their followers’ preexisting beliefs and disguised themselves among actual news photos. There’s no way to say just how many DeSantis supporters saw through it, but the way the creators sought to confuse them may be what’s most disturbing here.

As the cultural theorist Rob Horning recently wrote in his newsletter, Internal Exile: ‘all images are ‘real’ when people circulate them, because the communication being carried out through the images is real.’ Or, as researcher Max Rizzuto explained to Fast Company in April how a deepfake impacts a viewer: ‘Even when it’s disproven, the emotions that they experienced are not nullified.’ DeSantis’ deepfakes appeared to embrace this logic: Rather than fabricate a whole new story, DeSantis’ team punched up the intensity of a preexisting one.” Some folks calls these fakes “fascist realism.”

As House Speaker Kevin McCarthy illustrated in his tortuous election by promising a small minority of rightwing congressional zealots undeserved power well beyond what their numbers justify, truth, fairness, equal representation and voting power now take a backseat to “whatever I need to do to get elected” politics. And if one of the two leading GOP candidates for the US presidency has no problem fabricating events, images and statements from his opponents, how soon before voters will no longer know what is real and what is not? Or is it already way too late?

I’m Peter Dekom, and if you want to see where deep fakes hiding under the First Amendment can take us, stand back and stand by… democracy is leaving the building.