The official account of the Republican House Judiciary Committee today posted an AI-generated photo of presidential candidate Donald Trump submerged chest-deep in water, shutting his eyes while embracing a duck and kitten.
“Protect our kittens and ducks in Ohio!” the elected officials wrote above the image.
Though the influential Republican committee — one of the House of Representative’s most esteemed assignments — didn’t explicitly denote or watermark the image as AI-generated, it certainly doesn’t look real; the former president’s features are oddly smooth, as are those of the cartoonishly calm-looking cat and duck.
Influential Trump supporter and X owner Elon Musk reshared the picture, captioning it with a smiling-face-with-hearts emoji.
But the image wasn’t created to make Trump, who famously doesn’t care for pets, look cuddly. It was created to reinforce the false story that Haitian immigrants flooding to the US are killing and eating their neighbors’ pets — an inflammatory partisan rumor based on largely debunked “reports” and murky social media hearsay that, according to actual law enforcement officials, have no merit.
And in a bigger sense, it’s something we’re seeing more and more: American political candidates and operatives, usually on the right, using AI to dream up fantastical things that affirm their worldview — even if they never actually happened.
The claim that a Haitian immigrant in Canton, Ohio had killed and eaten a neighbor’s cat went viral on social media this weekend after the Malaysia-based right-wing influencer Ian Miles Cheong shared an alleged video of the incident to his 1.1 million followers.
Without evidence, Cheong — a former contributor to RT, the Russian state-backed media company connected to the recent Russian influence campaign scandal involving several popular right-wing social media influencers — told followers that the woman who committed the disturbing crime was a Haitian immigrant.
Shortly after that, in the same thread, another right-wing poster shared an image of a man carrying a goose, which he presented as evidence of Haitians stealing and slaying Ohio animals. Alongside the photo was a screenshot of a viral post said to be taken from a Springfield, Ohio Facebook group, in which a local resident warned that “rangers & police” had told them that immigrants had stolen and eaten family pets like cats and dogs and had taken ducks and geese from a local park.
“There are reports of Haitian migrants stealing and butchering geese, cats and dogs in Springfield, Ohio,” the X poster in Cheong’s comments captioned the screenshot. “Thanks, Kamala.” (A nearly-identical post was shared the day before by another popular right-wing account, “End Wokeness.”)
But as the Springfield News-Sun reported earlier today, Springfield police have denied the validity of the Facebook-shared rumor, telling the newspaper that the allegations of animal theft by immigrants are “not something that’s on our radar right now.”
Cheong’s baseless claim about the horror story in Canton was also quickly debunked. As the Daily Dot points out, no media reports about the incident noted that the accused cat-eater, a 27-year-old Canton resident named Allexis Ferrell, was a Haitian immigrant — not even Fox News‘ writeup. And as other social media users were quick to rebut, a standard internet search reveals that Ferrell has been in the country since at least before the Biden administration.
But regardless of the lack of evidence, the rumors spread like wildfire across X, where right-wing influencers and commentators including Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, reactionary commentator Benny Johnson — who was one of the personalities being secretly paid by Russian government to churn out divisive content — and billionaire X owner Musk have seized on the reactionary claims. (Kirk, for instance, took to X on Sunday with a conspiratorial rant about the “Biden-Harris mass immigration replacement plan.”)
And then, earlier today, the GOP’s House Judiciary Committee officially weighed in with its AI-generated image — implying, without any confirmed evidence, that immigrants are out to kill Ohio’s adorable animals en masse, and that Trump will be the one to save them.
The committee’s use of AI sparked a series of copycat posts.
“Save the animals!!!” one blue-checked X user wrote in response to the house committee, adding an AI-generated image of Trump and a horde of mishappen animals together in a dingy.
“Save the kittens,” reads another post, this one portraying the 78-year-old former president leaping out of a helicopter to scoop up the animals. “Protect the ducks.”
For a powerful group of elected representatives tasked with ensuring the administration of justice to share an AI-generated image falsely affirming uncorroborated or entirely debunked partisan rumors is an alarming use of AI technology in the political sphere.
It’s true that Springfield, Ohio has experienced a large influx of Haitian immigrants in recent months, most of whom have fled widespread political and gang violence in their home country, and that the town has thus become an accidental epicenter of the ongoing debate over immigration, as The New York Times recently reported.
But local law enforcement has made it clear that they’ve received no reports about stolen animals at the hands of Haitian immigrants, despite a viral Facebook post and one picture of one man with one goose. And there’s no evidence that the awful killing of the cat in Canton was by a recent immigrant, nevermind one from Haiti.
Regardless of glaring evidentiary holes, though, the influential Capitol Hill committee used AI to drum up a fake picture of Donald Trump embracing Ohio’s cutest fake animals, fanning partisan flames and affirming spurious, divisive rumors in the process.
But with the very AI-happy Trump holding firm as the party’s standard bearer, what else should we expect?
More on AI and the election: If You Zoom Into This “Photo” Trump Posted, You’ll Find Something Very Strange
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