Fabricated AI images depicting former President Trump being arrested are circulating social media as the country prepares for his possible indictment this week.
The images, created using artificial intelligence software (AI), show a large group of New York City Police Department officers arresting the former president as he resists being detained.
Some of the images posted on Twitter even depict Trump being in jail and then escaping to McDonald’s.
The images, which were first shared on Twitter by Eliot Higgins, founder and creative director of investigative collective Bellingcat, have gone viral on social media.
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Higgins explained in a tweet that he used MidJourney V5 — an AI software that creates images from a written prompt — to form the images. That prompt that he used read “Donald Trump falling over while getting arrested. Fibonacci Spiral. News footage,” and it produced many of the images that were posted on Twitter.
He told the Associated Press that the image of Trump being arrested “was really just casually showing both how good and bad the software was at rendering real scenes,” and noted that one of the images featured Trump with three legs and a police belt.
“I had assumed that people would [realize] 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,” he told the AP.
Check some of the images below:
A New York grand jury is looking into Trump’s role in a hush-money payment made to adult-film star Stormy Daniels to cover up an alleged affair between the two.
Trump said over the weekend that he expects to be arrested this week in relation to the investigation and has called for his supporters to “protest and take our country back.”
