When President Joe Biden made the announcement that he would run for reelection, the Republican Party was standing by with an ad that used AI-created imagery to generate all their dark fantasies about what would happen in a second Biden term, from a zombie horde crossing the border to San Francisco being somehow “closed” because of so, so much fentanyl.
It wasn’t just that the ad used AI imagery. It was that nothing–absolutely nothing–in that ad had anything to do with the real world. Not one of the morbid fantasies in which the GOP indulged themselves was in any way an extrapolation of Biden’s policies. It wasn’t just fake images, it was fake images spawned out of wholly fake claims designed to keep Republican voters properly frightened and enraged.
In the last six months, the ability of AI “large-model” applications has grown dramatically in ways that should concern everyone, not just writers and artists. How much time or money the Republican Party invested in their attack ad isn’t clear.
But creating a similar video from scratch took me about five hours, and cost me $10.
Since I was using my aging old Mac Mini, I used iMovie, but there are dozens of freeware applications on PC or Mac that would have done just as well. The images themselves were created with Midjourney.
One thing that would have made this go much more quickly: Not pulling in each image to add a note that it was fake. That’s one step I had to do by hand because the image programs definitely do not include that warning.