• The United States Donald Trump assures that he will be arrested this Tuesday and encourages his supporters "to protest"

After announcing his imminent arrest last Saturday, it would be easy to believe that the images of Donald Trump resisting arrest, wearing the typical orange prisoner jumpsuit and crying in a courthouse circulating on Twitter this weekend were real. But they are not. These are images created with artificial intelligence.

In a message released on his social network Truth Social, the former US president set Tuesday 21 as the date on which he would be arrested for the alleged payment of bribes to the porn film actress known as Stormy Daniels. The call to his followers to "protest" to "take back our nation" sparked the fear of an entire country that his supporters would commit violent acts like those of January 6, 2021. The arrest never happened, but the technology had already done its job: the images have been seen by more than five million tweeters.

Trump 'escapes' from jail and ends up in the McDonalds.@EliotHiggins

It was Eliot Higgins, journalist and founder of the investigative collective Bellingcat, who created these deepfakes. The Briton shared the images on Twitter, but noted in the thread that they had been generated with Midjourney, a tool that uses generative AI to create images from a short text. In an interview with The Washington Post, Higgins acknowledged that "Midjourney understands simple directions well, but more complex ones get strange results."

If you look closely at the images, you will see that while Trump tries to get away from the Forrest Gump cops, his tie changes color, going from black and white stripes to navy blue. Or you may have noticed that one of the NYPD officers trying to restrain the former US president is missing a finger, while the Republican appears to be suffering from polydactyly in his left hand. There's even an image of Trump wearing a police belt.

Melania Trump, after the 'detention' of her marido.@EliotHiggins

Need another clue? They look for the writings on the walls of the McDonalds during her supposed escape from prison or the scared face of Melania Trump at the time of her husband's arrest. "If you ask Midjourney for expressions," Higgins explains to Wired magazine, "he tends to depict them in an exaggerated way, with very pronounced skin folds."

Higgins did not create the images with bad intentions, but out of "boredom" while waiting, like everyone else, for the Republican to be arrested. However, the platform penalized him and without any explanation. According to the journalist, on Wednesday he was blocked from accessing the Midjourney server.

On the eve of the 2024 presidential elections in the United States, we should ask: what is the policy of Twitter – and other social networks – on images created with artificial intelligence tools? Although Higgins claimed that he did not seek to mislead users, the current policy of Elon Musk's platform explains that it is not allowed to "share synthetic, manipulated or out-of-context media that can mislead or confuse people and cause harm."

Anyone who clicks on Higgins' thread will realize that the images aren't real, but it seems that, this time, someone has managed to circumvent Twitter's policies.

According to The Trust Project criteria

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  • Donald Trump
  • United States
  • America
  • Artificial intelligence