Trump baselessly accuses Harris of faking crowd size with AI
- Published on August 12, 2024 at 22:33
- 7 min read
- By Bill MCCARTHY, AFP USA
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"Has anyone noticed that Kamala CHEATED at the airport? There was nobody at the plane, and she 'A.I.'d' it, and showed a massive 'crowd' of so-called followers, BUT THEY DIDN’T EXIST!" the Republican nominee wrote August 11, 2024 in the first of a series of posts on his Truth Social platform.
"She was turned in by a maintenance worker at the airport when he noticed the fake crowd picture, but there was nobody there, later confirmed by the reflection of the mirror like finish on the Vice Presidential Plane. She's a CHEATER."
Trump added in another post: "There was nobody there!"
The allegation comes as the former president fights an election that was transformed by President Joe Biden's decision to quit the race and endorse Harris, his vice president.
The claim about Harris's August 7 rally had reverberated throughout right-wing and conspiratorial social media circles before reaching Trump, who shared an X post from conservative commentator Chuck Callesto, honing in on the reflection of the side of the plane as evidence of fakery. Similar posts claiming the plane's reflection proves the crowd was fake spread across other platforms, including Facebook.
Rapid advances in AI have accelerated the spread of fake images and other disinformation online during a year of consequential elections worldwide.
But the claim that Harris faked the crowd in Detroit is false. The audience comprised thousands of people, including an AFP video journalist who captured footage of supporters who packed an airfield hangar and spilled onto the tarmac to see Harris and her running mate, Tim Walz.
Live shots and photos from numerous other media outlets and attendees from a range of angles also showed the scale of the audience that Trump claimed did not exist.
Now that’s how you pull up in Detroit. pic.twitter.com/l9BHPQ9czK
— Daniel Wessel (@da_wessel) August 7, 2024
Some Democrats at the rally shared their own photos from the venue and poked fun at Trump for his posts (archived here).
"I'm honored that whoever made the AI image of 15,000 excited Democrats welcoming @kamalaharris and @tim_walz to Detroit was kind enough to include me at the lectern," Lavora Barnes, chair of the Michigan Democratic Party, wrote in one such post on X (archived here).
AFP contacted the Trump campaign for comment, but no response was forthcoming.
No evidence of AI
The specific photo in question appears to have been first posted by a Harris campaign official who wrote on X that he received it from another staffer (archived here).
The Harris campaign did not immediately respond to AFP's requests for comment.
But the campaign shared an original copy of the staffer's photo -- which appears dimmer than the high-exposure version circulating online and highlighted by Trump -- with the BBC, telling the British broadcaster it was “not modified by AI in any way" (archived here). The BBC reported that the metadata on the campaign's photo confirmed it was taken around the time of Harris's arrival at the August 7 event.
"This is an actual photo of a 15,000-person crowd for Harris-Walz in Michigan," the campaign’s official rapid response page wrote on X (archived here).
AFP could not verify that the picture was not brightened to offset the shadow cast on the spectators by the airport hangar, which experts said created unusual lighting some online might have mistaken for signs of AI.
The University of California-Berkeley's Hany Farid, a digital forensics expert, told AFP in an August 12 direct message that he suspects "the only alteration was some simple brightness/contrast and perhaps sharpening" (archived here).
But Farid said two models designed to identify traces of AI uncovered no evidence the technology was used (archived here).
Drexel University's Matthew Stamm also analyzed the image for AFP and said in an August 12 email that his specialized software "did not find any evidence that the image was generated by AI" (archived here).
Some of the spectators in the photo appear to also be visible in other images from the rally (archived here).
The plane's reflection
Experts said the crowd is likely not directly mirrored in the side of the aircraft because of its distance from the audience and the angle of its hull -- not because nobody was present, as Trump claimed.
"For a convex surface like the body of the plane, objects above and below the surface are most visible and dominate the reflection," Farid said. "Objects that are further away and more centered are compressed and less visible."
Videos and photos from the scene show the audience was restricted by barricades.
"The crowd appears to be set back from the plane by a significant distance," Stamm said. "Because of the combination of the imaging angle and the fact that the hull of the plane is curved, the reflection on the hull of the plane and the engine will show the ground immediately in front of the plane."
Farid also noted that the plane appears rotated relative to the viewer.
"Because the camera is so far away, even a small rotation of the reflecting surface will cause what is reflected to move significantly," he said.
One structure that appears to be shown in the reflection, for example, is situated beside the airfield hangar under which the crowd was gathered.
AFP has debunked other misinformation about the 2024 election here.
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