The pornstar-gate becomes a clamorous case of Orwellian manipulation and disinformation, as well as an open institutional conflict between powers, while the grand jury postpones any decision to next week. On the one hand, the Manhattan prosecutor’s office, which accuses the Republicans of the House of “interfering” in the investigation by requesting the hearing of the prosecutor Alvis Bragg “only after Donald Trump has created the false expectation of his imminent arrest”.
On the other hand, the viral spread on social media of the photos of the tycoon in handcuffs, fake but so realistic that they seem real because they are generated by artificial intelligence, as also happened recently with those of Macron who witnesses the clashes between police and demonstrators in the streets of Paris. In Trump’s case, we see him running away from the police, or behind bars in a cell, in an orange prison suit, in the dock while he cries. There are also his wife Melania who protests her arrest (but here the AI takes a crab by portraying an agent in the guise of her husband) and son Donald junior who gets into a fight with the policemen. All the work of Eliot Higgins, founder of the Bellingcat investigative journalism platform, who wanted to imagine and visualize the various moments of the arrest by relying on version 5 of Midjourney, a $30-a-month image art generator. It is accessed through a digital platform called Discord, where a short text is provided describing the image to be created and the artificial intelligence app takes care of the rest, producing the requested “deep fake”. “Just kidding. I thought maybe only five people would retweet them,” Higgins explained in an interview after being sanctioned by Midjourney. Instead the web went wild, and two days later his Twitter posts describing an event that never happened were viewed 5 million times, creating a case study in the growing sophistication of AI-generated imagery and the ease with which it can create confusion in a world of volatile information, fueling fake news, conspiracy theories, and general public distrust of everything they see. The episode also highlights the absence of corporate standards or government regulations addressing the use of artificial intelligence to create and spread falsehoods, at a time when web giants are battling it out. But Trump would also have contributed to manipulating public opinion, according to the Manhattan prosecutor’s office, which accuses the tycoon of having created “the false expectation of his imminent arrest” after last Saturday he had prophesied it for Tuesday.
And the House Republicans that they launched “an unprecedented investigation into an ongoing local investigation” only after this move by the former president and the prompting of his lawyers. An “interference” defined as an “illegal incursion into the sovereignty of New York”. Meanwhile, Trump continues his attacks, evoking a “Gestapo” system, while Florida governor Ron DeSantis, Donald Trump’s main potential rival in the race for the White House, sharpens his attacks and distances himself from the Ukrainian conflict, after declassifying it to a “territorial dispute that does not represent a vital US interest”. “I think Putin is a war criminal … who should be held accountable for his responsibilities,” he said, condemning “the Russian invasion.”