By Samantha Simon
[email protected]
An AI-generated video of former US President Donald Trump has been circulating on social media, using his likeness to disparage Antigua and Barbuda and Prime Minister Gaston Browne.
The video shows Trump’s false likeness speaking on issues around the island such as the roads and the hospital, and it also references a degrading term he’d used for Haiti and African countries in 2018 in describing Antigua and Barbuda.
This video is a type of AI content known as a ‘deep fake,’ a type of synthetic media created using artificial intelligence to manipulate or generate visual and audio content that depicts people saying or doing things that they never actually said or did.
A similar video recently made its way across social media, attacking Jamaica’s Prime Minister, Andrew Holness.
Minister of Information and Technology, Melford Nicholas, told Observer of his concern regarding the potential abuse of AI technology to generate such deep fakes.
“I commented at the last CBU annual general meeting here in Antigua that these are some of the concerns that I have, inclusive of those that will come down the pike with respect to the misuse and abuse of AI,” he said.
“So far, my words have not fallen on infertile ground, because more recently I’ve seen AI-generated videos purporting to be in the voice of the current and past US presidents trying to vilify a sitting Caribbean Prime Minister.”
The Prime Minister’s Chief of Staff, Lionel ‘Max’ Hurst, called the video “fake and rubbish, intended for the naïve”.
An increasing number of deep fakes have been used to target leaders of countries as well as political candidates in the US, Poland and the UK, with the current election in India being marred by the use of deep fakes to attack political candidates.
Last week, 20 companies including Adobe, Microsoft, Google, Facebook owner Meta, and artificial intelligence leader, OpenAI, launched a “Tech Accord,” pledging to work together to create tools like watermarks and detection techniques to spot, label and debunk “deep fakes” — AI-manipulated video, audio and images of public figures.
