ALBAWABA - Widely circulated images on social media claiming to show US President Donald Trump coming face to face with strange pale-skinned persons inside the White House have been exposed as AI-generated fakes, despite sparking a flurry of conspiracy theories online.
The pictures, which showed Trump posing with bizarre human-like creatures in red outfits, went viral on social media sites, with some users thinking they indicated a covert encounter with aliens or the so-called “lizard people.” The Economic Times fact-checked and found no evidence of such a meeting taking place, and that the photographs were generated using artificial intelligence.
The dispute apparently started when comedian and political analyst Jon Stewart posted one of the photographs as a joke, saying Trump had posted then erased it for a short time. But the photograph swiftly traveled beyond its initial humorous context and was taken up by conspiracy-focused accounts that presented it as legitimate, The Economic Times said.
There was much of conjecture and several online commentators were out to refute the allegation. One of them was political commentator Mario Nawfal, who openly said the photos were AI-generated and condemned the speed at which misinformation had spread across social media platforms, according to The Economic Times.
The viral photographs came as popular interest in unidentified aerial phenomena and extraterrestrial beliefs remain high after years of speculation and government revelations of UFO research. Analysts think the climate has made people more vulnerable to spectacular claims about claimed alien encounters.
But there’s been no convincing evidence of any such meeting with Trump, despite the online conjecture. "Fact-checkers and media sites have identified the photos as being completely synthetic and say it's another example of how generative AI can be used to make convincing but misleading content that may spread swiftly online.
And the episode has sparked further worries about the increasing difficulty of telling real pictures from ones created by AI, especially as sophisticated image-generation software becomes more widely available.
