Taylor Swift’s fans are not supporting Donald Trump en masse. Kamala Harris did not give a speech to a sea of communists at the Democratic National Convention while standing in front of the hammer and sickle. Hillary Clinton was not recently seen walking around Chicago wearing a MAGA hat. But there are pictures of all of these things.
In recent weeks, the right-wing corners of social media have been full of such depictions, created using generative AI tools. They are instantly recognizable because they display the technology’s distinctive image style: not quite, but almost photorealistic, frequently outrageous, not so dissimilar to a tabloid illustration. Donald Trump – or at least whoever controls his social media accounts – posted the AI-generated photo of Harris holding a hammer and sickle, as well as a series of fake images showing Taylor Swift dressed as Uncle Sam and young women dressed in Swifties for Trump shirts. (And this after he falsely claimed that Harris had posted a photo that had been edited using an “AI” – a neat projection.)
Trump himself has been the subject of generative AI art, and has shared depictions of himself since March 2023. He is often dressed as a cowboy with a gun or in a World War II uniform while storming a beach. Yet these are tame compared to much of the material created and shared by far-right influencers and shitposters. There are many mocking or degrading images of Harris and other Democratic politicians like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. On X, a post containing a fake image implying Harris is a sex worker was viewed more than 3.5 million times; on Facebook, the same post was shared more than 87,000 times. A pro-Trump account, a fanboy of Elon Musk, recently shared a lewd image showing a scantily clad Harris surrounded by several clones of Donald Trump; it was viewed 1.6 million times. There are pictures and videos of Harris and Trump holding hands on a beach and Harris wearing a crown that says Inflation Queen. On the first night of the DNC, MAGA influencers like Catturd2 and Jack Posobiec supplemented their angry tweets about the Democrats with stylized AI images of Tim Walz and Joe Biden with angry facial expressions.
While no ideology has a monopoly on AI art, the high-resolution, low-budget look of generative AI imagery seems to be merging with the meme-loving aesthetic of the MAGA movement. At least in the fever swamps of social media, AI art is MAGA-coded. The GOP is becoming the party of AI trash.
AI trash is inherently non-political. It is most prevalent on platforms like Facebook, where click farmers and spammers build elaborate networks to flood pages and groups with cheap, fake images of starving children and Shrimp Jesus, hoping to go viral, get likes and collect “creator bonuses” for their online engagement. Jason Koebler, a technology reporter who has spent the last year investigating Facebook’s AI trash economy, has called the flood of artificial images part of a “zombie internet” and “the end of a shared reality” in which “a mix of bots, humans and accounts that were once human but are no longer human interact to form a disastrous website with little social connection.”
What’s going on on the MAGA internet isn’t quite the same as the spam situation on Facebook, although the sentiment is similar. MAGA influencers may post AI photos for fun, but they’re also engaging in engagement farming, particularly on X, where premium subscribers can opt into the platform’s revenue share program. Right-wing influencers have been vocal about these bonuses, which are paid out based on how many times a creator’s content is viewed in a given month. “The payout has been huge. They keep getting bigger,” Catturd2 posted this March, praising Musk.
While many of these influencers already have a sizable following, AI image generators give diehard posters what they need most: cheap, fast, and on-demand material for content. Instead of picking out a few sentences complaining about Biden’s age or ridiculing Harris’ economic policies, far-right posters can illustrate their attacks and attract more attention. And it’s getting easier: Last week, X integrated the latest version of the generative AI engine Grok, which uses fewer guardrails than some rival models and has already conjured up countless illustrations of celebrities and politicians in compromising situations.
It’s helpful to think of these photos and illustrations not as nefarious deepfakes or even hyper-persuasive propaganda, but as digital sidekick—Shrimp Jesus on the campaign trail. Right now, little (if anything) of what’s being generated is convincing enough to fool voters, and most of it is being used to confirm the biases of true believers. Still, the flood of AI-generated political imagery is a pollutant in a broader online information ecosystem. This AI junk doesn’t just exist in the vacuum of a particular social network: It leaves a kind of ecological footprint on the web. The images are created, copied, shared, and embedded in websites; they’re indexed in search engines. It’s possible that AI art tools will later train on these distorted representations and create distorted, digitally incestuous depictions of historical figures. The mere existence of so many quickly produced fake images adds a layer of unreality to the internet. You and I, like voters everywhere, have to wade through this pile of garbage and painstakingly sort out what is obviously false, what is real, and what lies in the murky middle.
In many ways, political trash is a logical end to these image generators, which seem to be useful mostly to people looking to make a quick buck. Photography, illustration, and graphic design used to require skill, or at least time, to create something interesting enough to attract attention that could be converted into real money online. Now, free or easily affordable tools are flooding the market. What once required expert labor is now spam generated by tools trained to produce the results of real artists and photographers. Spam is annoying, but ultimately easy to ignore—that is, until it collides with the negative incentives of social media platforms, where it is used by political shitposters and crooks. Then the images become something else. In the hands of Trump, they create mini news cycles and narratives that need to be debunked. In the hands of influencers, they are fired at our timelines indiscriminately to get a bit of attention. As with Facebook’s AI farms, the social media scandal jocks who produce obviously fake, low-quality images don’t care whether they’re upsetting real people, boring them, or providing fodder for bots and other spammers. It’s all about engagement for engagement. Mindlessly generated information clogs up our information pathways and forces consumers to do the work of deleting it.
That these tools should ultimately be the medium of choice for Trump’s political movement also makes sense. It stands to reason that a politician who has spent many years spinning an endless string of lies into a patchwork alternate reality would be drawn to technology that allows one to rewrite history in a way that flatters him with a quick prompt. Likewise, it’s obvious that Trump’s devoted followers—an extremely online-oriented group that has internalized conspiracy theories and voter denials to the point that some of its members stormed the Capitol—would delight in the bespoke memes and crude depictions of AI art. The MAGA movement has spent nine years building a coalition of conspiracy-theoretical hyper-parties dedicated to creating a fictional information universe in which to wrap themselves. Now they can illustrate it.
