It's Both Hilarious and Sad How Easily MAGA Folks Are Fooled by AI
At the height of Hurricane Helene, an image went viral that MAGA types felt captured the devastating human cost of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’ disastrous mishandling of the crisis.
It was a sight designed to tug mercilessly at the heartstrings of the American people: a weeping little girl in an orange life vest cradling a puppy against a backdrop of watery devastation.
Republican senator Mike Lee, a fifty-three-year-old man, tweeted the image accompanied by the words, “Caption this photo.”
This struck me as hilarious because the heartbreaking “photograph” of that poor, innocent girl abandoned by the Biden/Harris administration in their unhinged zeal to give every last dollar to illegal alien mass murderers was obviously AI-generated.
The kitschy tableau had all the hallmarks of AI horseshit. It looks more like a Precious Moments figurine or a Love Is cartoon than a real photograph.
MAGA Patriots became apoplectic when it was politely pointed out that what Conservatives were positing as heartbreaking photographic evidence of the Biden-Harris administration’s crimes against humanity was clearly AI nonsense cynically created to promote a political agenda.
When Buzz Patterson, a white dude in sunglasses with a blue check and a little over three hundred and eighty-one thousand Twitter followers, quote-tweeted the image with the words “Our government has failed us again,” and journalist Luke Zaleski pointed out that it was perhaps not a genuine photograph but rather a fiction created through the black magic of artificial intelligence the first response was “Who cares you literal piece of shit. People are suffering and dying.”
It did not matter to this gentleman that the AI image he was aggressively defending did not show people suffering or dying, just a fictional girl and a fictional puppy.
What mattered to the MAGA people was that the fake image being widely disseminated as real could be real. The girl could exist. The reality could be just as cartoonishly mawkish and melodramatic.
When informed that her heart was broken by a computer-generated image of a person and puppy that did not exist, Amy Kremer, co-founder of Women for Trump insisted, “Y’all, I don’t know where this photo came from and honestly, it doesn’t matter. There are people going through much worse than what is shown in this pic. So I’m leaving it because it is emblematic of the trauma and pain people are living through right now.”
Furthermore, the MAGA mob thought that a cynical fiction created on the internet forum patriot.win should be real. It should be real because if it was, then it would feed into the narrative that the Biden-Harris administration is incompetent and evil.
They would have to be the absolute worst, just the absolute dregs of humanity, for the GOP’s fierce conviction that the only way to prevent a fiery apocalypse is to give Donald Trump unlimited power, including the power to use the justice department to punish anyone who displeases him, something that he has promised to do if elected, to make any sense.
Trump supporters are, by definition, gullible. They wouldn’t support Donald Trump if they did not have terrible judgment and a total inability to delineate between strength and the pathetic caricature of macho masculinity Trump is very successfully selling to his cult.
I’ve written earlier about a Facebook page called America’s Last Line of Defense that exists to mock gullible Trump cultists with clearly fake headlines that are shared by gullible idiots who think that they’re real because they want them to be real.
You’d think they’d learn their lesson after the tenth or twelfth time they share something that didn’t happen, but they never do.
I am both amused and horrified by how often and how easily the older generation is fooled by what, to me at least, is clearly AI.
It’s a generational thing. As a Gen Xer, I’ve seen how powerful and insidious AI has become over seemingly just the last year or so.
I like to think that I have a pretty good AI detector, in part because AI images are generally pretty damn easy to spot. They’re in their uncanny valley phase now, where they look just enough like real people to seem incredibly disturbing.
I have a visceral negative response to AI. I hate it. It’s creepy and cynical and wrong morally but I despise it just as much from an aesthetic perspective.
People in their sixties and older I suspect don’t have that response because they’re not as plugged in and online. It’s both hilarious and sad how easily seniors are fooled.
On Facebook I hate-read pages full of AI images of glum-looking old women with their ostensible creations asking commenters to rate their handiwork.
It’s the most cynical and transparent of scams, designed to get engagement at all costs but the page’s audience is consistently fooled.
Trump’s minions have made AI an unfortunate part of this singularly awful presidential race. He’s posted and reposted AI of himself, saving animals and babies. The sadly iconic image of the sad, sobbing, wet little girl with a puppy serves a distinct purpose.
Trump has been ratcheting up false accusations against FEMA, including the clear-cut fiction that money allocated for disaster relief is all going to pay for illegal immigrants to come into our country so they can vote Democratic.
This has no basis, but Trump and his supporters want it to be true. He’s never let the truth stand in the way of a flattering fiction.
The disgraced, twice-impeached thirty-four-time felon knows that his base is deeply unintelligent, particularly where artificial intelligence is concerned. He’s counting on it. Without rubes and lies, Trump would never gotten anywhere politically, and there is a horrifyingly real possibility that the idiot brigade will be gullible enough to make him the most powerful man for four more horrible years.
Let’s stop him. Vote. Vote like your life depended on it because the stakes couldn’t be higher. Lots of half-wits fooled by AI propaganda will be voting. Let’s not give them any more power than is necessary.
Nathan got life-changing dental implants, but they’re crazy expensive, so he set up a GoFundMe at https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-nathans-journey-to-dental-implants. Give if you can!
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