Eerie deepfakes claiming to show Trump’s arrest spread across Twitter
Twitter was flooded Wednesday with AI-generated deepfake photos of former President Donald Trump resisting arrest and trying to run from police ahead of his potential New York indictment this week.
The fabricated images — which had been viewed more than 4 million times — appear to show Trump yelling and fighting off at least five NYPD officers.
In others, he’s depicted breaking free from cops and bolting as Melania Trump and Donald Trump Jr. shout in protest of his arrest.
Many of the disturbingly realistic-looking images were shared widely by Twitter users, who falsely claimed they were legitimate.
The fakes come as a Manhattan grand jury is weighing whether to indict Trump in connection to hush money paid to porn star Stormy Daniels in 2016.
Eliot Higgins, founder of the investigative group Bellingcat, tweeted out the deepfakes and said they were created with the artificial intelligence text-to-image generator Midjourney.
“Making pictures of Trump getting arrested while waiting for Trump’s arrest,” he tweeted.
The images were made using the prompt “Donald Trump falling over while getting arrested. Fibonacci Spiral. News footage,” he said.
“The Trump arrest image was really just casually showing both how good and bad Midjourney was at rendering real scenes, like the first image has Trump with three legs and a police belt,” Higgins said later, adding he didn’t think observers would take the shots seriously.
“I had assumed that people would realize Donald Trump has two legs, not three, but that appears not to have stopped some people passing them off as genuine, which highlights that lack of critical thinking skills in our educational system.”
Another deepfake created by a Twitter user known as O’Keefe Reborn also claims to show a mugshot of Trump while others show him behind bars in an orange jumpsuit.
Trump has not been arrested.
The Manhattan grand jury didn’t reconvene Wednesday as scheduled due to a witness who was not available to appear, sources told The Post.
If Trump is indicted, it would make him the first former president ever to be charged with a crime.
