AI poses an obvious danger to millennia-long human fight to find the truth. Large language model "hallucinations," vocal deepfakes, and now increased use of video deepfakes have all had a blurring effect on facts, letting bad actors around the globe brush off even recorded events as mere "fake news."
The danger is perhaps most acute in the political realm, where deepfake audio and video can make any politician say or appear to do anything. In such a climate, our most senior elected officials have a special duty to model truth-seeking behavior and responsible AI use.
But what's the fun in that, when you can just blow up negotiations over a budget impasse by posting a deepfake video of your political opponents calling themselves "a bunch of woke pieces of shit" while mariachi music plays in the background? Oh—and did I mention the fake mustache? Or the CGI sombrero?
On Monday night, the president of the United States, a man with access to the greatest intelligence-gathering operation in the world, posted to his Truth Social account a 35-second AI-generated video filled with crude insults, racial overtones, and bizarre conspiracy theories. The video targeted two Democratic leaders who had recently been meeting with Trump over a possible agreement to fund the government; I would have thought this kind of video was a pretty poor way to get people to agree with you, but, apparently, AI-generated insults are the real "art of the deal."
In the clip, a deepfake version of Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) utters a surreal monologue as his colleague Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) looks on... in a sombrero.
The New York Times described the video in somewhat anodyne fashion, saying that the "voice of Senator Chuck Schumer was distorted to deliver expletive-laden remarks that included the line, 'Nobody likes Democrats anymore.'" While this description of the video is accurate, it runs the risk of "sane-washing" the absolutely unhinged and divisive uses to which AI is currently being put. Here's the full quote:
Look, guys, there's no way to sugarcoat it. Nobody likes Democrats anymore. We have no voters left because of all of our woke trans bullshit. Not even Black people want to vote for us anymore. Even Latinos hate us. So we need new voters. And, if we give all these illegal aliens free health care, we might be able to get 'em on our side so they can vote for us. They can't even speak English, so they won't realize we're just a bunch of woke pieces of shit, you know, at least for a while until they learn English and realize they hate us, too.
People in the US illegally cannot vote in federal or state elections, of course, and almost never do so. A 2024 Georgia audit run by Republicans, for instance, found that "20 of the 8.2 million people registered to vote in the state are not US citizens"—and 11 of those had no history of voting despite being registered.
Knowledge is hard to find and harder to disseminate. Even the phrase "a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes," often incorrectly attributed to Mark Twain, turns out to have a long, slippery history that many people still don't know.
In such a world, the last thing truth needs is to be doused in buckets of AI slop. And yet here we are.
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