Former President Donald Trump played into the false claim that Vice President Kamala Harris used artificial intelligence to enhance the size of her crowds.
In a post to his social media platform, Truth Social, Trump supported an online conspiracy theory that claims Harris used AI to depict the crowds at her rallies, which he believes should make her “disqualified because the creation of a fake image is ELECTION INTERFERENCE.”
“Has anyone noticed that Kamala CHEATED at the airport? There was nobody at the plane, and she ‘A.I.’d’ it, and showed a massive ‘crowd’ of so-called followers, BUT THEY DIDN’T EXIST!” Trump posted Sunday on Truth Social.
“She’s a CHEATER. She had NOBODY waiting, and the ‘crowd’ looked like 10,000 people! Same thing is happening with her fake ‘crowds’ at her speeches. This is the way the Democrats win Elections, by CHEATING — And they’re even worse at the Ballot Box. She should be disqualified because the creation of a fake image is ELECTION INTERFERENCE. Anyone who does that will cheat at ANYTHING!” Trump continued.
The Harris campaign confirmed to the Washington Examiner that the photo Trump posted was taken by the Harris campaign and was not altered by AI. There have also been independent reviews of the photos that determine they were not altered by AI in any way.
The crowd at Harris’s rally filled an airport hanger in Michigan and welcomed Harris and Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) off Air Force Two last week.
“While the lack of evidence of manipulation is not evidence the image is real,” Hany Farid, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and a digital forensics expert, said on LinkedIn, “we find no evidence that this image is AI-generated or digitally altered.”
“These are not conspiratorial rantings from the deepest recesses of the internet. The author could have the nuclear codes and be responsible for decisions that will affect us all for decades,” David Plouffe, a Harris campaign senior adviser, said on X.
Since Trump’s inauguration in 2017, he has emphasized the crowd size of those who show up for him. Trump recently expressed his frustration with Harris’s rallies, saying his “Stop the Steal” rally drew in more people than that of Martin Luther King Jr.’s March on Washington.
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“Nobody has spoken to crowds bigger than me,” Trump recently said at his news conference at Mar-a-Lago. “If you look at Martin Luther King, when he did his speech, his great speech, and you look at ours, same real estate, same everything, same number of people.”
The Trump campaign did not respond to the Washington Examiner’s request for comment.