What is real these days? Who cares? Reform UK doesn’t seem to. This week, the party’s Hamble Valley branch was criticised after an apparently AI-generated group portrait was spotted on its About page. The image – featuring 12 grinning adults, clad in navy and beige jackets, staring suspiciously straight-on into the “camera” – was captioned with the words: “Real People – Not Career Politicians.” You couldn’t make it up!
The alleged AI flop was picked up by the X account @PoliticsMoments – and within a day, Hamble Valley’s website was taken down. Not before commentators had feasted on the irony, though. Eastleigh News was quick to point out that the uncanny image includes a black man, just days after the Reform MP Sarah Pochin said that it “drives me mad seeing adverts full of black and Asian people”. But when did AI slop ever make sense anyway?
My Instagram Explore page, long a deranged, hallucinatory place, has become more unhinged than ever in recent months: Donald Trump getting down on his knees and unbuckling Benjamin Netanyahu’s belt. Queen Liz getting a fresh trim in a barber shop. Kim Jong Un biting a Labubu. I’m ashamed to admit that I’ve too often found myself lying in bed, clutching my iPhone, smirking, even laughing out loud, at these demented videos. Humour thrives off combining incongruous things and it’s precisely these illogical collisions that make AI slop so entertaining. It’s also what makes it so dangerous – and why the far right can’t get enough.
It is unsurprising that Donald Trump, who has a flimsy relationship with the truth, has fallen for weird AI-generated imagery. The 79-year-old US president recently shared a video of himself in a fighter jet plane, dropping bombs of faeces on protesters in Times Square – one of at least 62 AI-generated images or videos he’s shared on Truth Social since late 2022, according to the New York Times. Trump has shared depictions of himself in a glittering array of alternative lives: arm in arm with Elvis Presley; rocking out on stage with an electric guitar; posing as the Pope.
Some of Trump’s generative-AI posts are overtly racist – such as a video depiction of Hakeem Jeffries, the minority leader of the US House of Representatives, wearing a sombrero, with a mariachi band in the background. But others feel… wholesome. Trump cuddling a duck. Trump clutching a cat wearing glasses. And yet even the most innocuous-seeming images are injected with Maga ideology.
Take all the cutesy animal stuff. Trump began sharing it after his first debate with Kamala Harris, during which he claimed (without evidence) that Haitian immigrants in Ohio were consuming cats and dogs. In the AI-generated images, Trump is depicted as a heroic saviour, rescuing the whimpering, doe-eyed animals who hold up signs like “Kamala hates me” and “Don’t let them eat us. Vote for Trump!”. Propelled by social media algorithms, these sappy cat memes metastasise, invigorating the Maga fanbase and perpetuating their xenophobic claims.
This may all feel like a particularly 21st-century flavour of politics, but humour and absurdism have long been utilised by authoritarian leaders to promote radical alternative narratives. The Nazi’s ministry of propaganda made over 1,200 feature films, about half of which were comedies and some were mockumentaries. “They look like bad Hollywood knock-offs,” Valerie Weinstein, an expert in Nazi propaganda and the comedy films produced by the Third Reich, told the Guardian. “In none of them do you see that there’s a war going on, that there are shortages. They’re existing in this sort of fantasy.”
AI slop operates in a similar way: it prioritises fantasy over accuracy, surrealness over realism, vibes over substance. The most impactful content isn’t necessarily coherent or believable. Remember the dystopian “Trump Gaza” clip that the president shared on Instagram earlier this year – a stomach-churning rendition of the Palestinian territory’s future featuring Elon Musk eating a copious amount of hummus and a topless Trump and Netanyahu drinking cocktails.
To many, this AI rendition simply reified the ethnic cleansing in Gaza that other politicians were discussing euphemistically. But one scene seemed to counteract Trump’s politics: a shot of bearded bellydancers. Trump shared the video just over a month after signing the executive order declaring that only two sexes would be recognised in the US, making this brief, joyous depiction of gender-fluid identity feel incongruous.
But in a dizzying, digitally mediated world, bewildering contradictions like these command attention. Adverts are increasingly off-kilter. Companies are deliberately using sloppy slogans and repulsive imagery to make us look and keep us looking. Social media algorithms, which reward extreme content, turbocharge this process. The weirder the content, the more we engage with it, the further it travels across our feeds. According to a study conducted by London School of Economics, racially charged imagery containing AI-generated components receive disproportionately more views than traditional media.
Wonky alt-right AI-generated imagery has been slipping into the British political consciousness, too. A medieval knight soaked in blood holding up the French flag, captioned: “Our hearts beat English forever”. A knight wearing a shield painted with the Serbian coat of arms branded with the words: “For the flag, for the land, for ENGLAND”. Despite these heraldic errors, the posts receive hundreds of likes.
Right-wing politicians know this all too well. In August, Nigel Farage shared an AI-generated video of him wearing a big, white fur coat and a gold chain, rapping, with Union Jacks shooting out his eyes. “Nigel Farage: Prime Minister of the pub, of the pint, of the people. Bo selecta!” he says. The video is ridiculous, and that’s what makes it so sharable.
Farage captioned the video “a little bit of fun” – but if Trump’s maximalist AI machine is anything to go by, this type of content is far from harmless. We will doubtless see more AI slop from hard-right leaders in the UK, getting more eyes on xenophobic ideas. Absurd computer-generated content makes the world feel weirder and more surreal, eroding our desire to discern truth from fabrication. I’m certainly guilty of binging on dumb, dopamine-dinging crap. But as we get sucked into the brain-curdling universes of our respective iPhones, we should be wary of what we are watching and the alt-right voices slipping seamlessly into our minds.
[Further reading: Big tech’s futile attempt to kill death]
Content from our partners
Related
