Jun.19

electoral-vote.com

Dem 51

   

GOP 49

Lies, Damned Lies, and AI

There was a great deal of news yesterday that fits under this particular headline, so we're going to do this in list form. Before we get to it, let us thank readers M.M. in San Diego, CA, and J.C. in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, for bringing various stories to our attention. And with that, away we go:

• Same Old Song and Dance: Yesterday, we had an item involving: (1) a video of Joe Biden, doctored to make the President look like he's lost his marbles; (2) Donald Trump attacking Biden for being senile, and (3) Donald Trump screwing up his verbiage in the midst of attacking Biden for being senile. So, forgive us if it seems like we are repeating ourselves. We are not.
  
  The video, in this case, has been circulating for a few days and was taken during the G7 meeting. The usual suspects, with The New York Post taking the lead, have been pushing a video clip taken during a skydiving demonstration in which skydivers descended holding giant flags from each of the G7 countries, as well as the E.U. flag. In this version of the clip, Biden appears to wander off aimlessly before Italy's Georgia Meloni grabs his arm and leads him back to the scrum with the other leaders.
  
  And then there is the version of the video that has not been selectively cropped and edited. In the full version (start around 7:05), you can clearly see that Biden went to give the thumbs up and a congratulations to one of the skydivers, presumably the one who carried the U.S. flag. Meloni gets Biden's attention not because she thinks he's wandered off, but because she knows that the red-bereted commander of the group, to whom Biden's back is turned, is about to deliver some remarks.
  
  Yesterday, meanwhile, Donald Trump traveled to Wisconsin for one of his rallies (where he announced, incidentally, that he likes Milwaukee after all). During the rally, the former president issued forth with this harangue:

  Joe Biden is humiliating our country on the world stage. He's actually humiliating us. You saw what happened this weekend. It's turning the United States into a total joke all over the world. First, he wandered off the G7 in Europe on this stage. He looked like he didn't know where the hell he was, but he didn't know where he was. He's blaming it now on AI. He's saying he doesn't what [sic] AI is, but that's ok...
  
  But crooked Joe and his handlers are insisting he's sharper than ever, and they say the videos of Crooked Joe shuffling around are clean fakes. You know what a clean fake is? They're deceptively edited. They say they're deceptively edited. All of the mistakes that he's made. Every day. He can't go anywhere without a mistake.

  We are unaware of any case where the Biden campaign blamed something on AI that wasn't AI. And we are certain that both the President and his campaign understand full well what AI is. In any event, the term that Trump is looking for is actually "cheapfake" not "clean fake." Yesterday, we excused the Ronny Jackson/Ronny Johnson screw-up. But at a certain point, if a person can't get their own words right, they are being hypocritical when they attack others for their alleged mental lapses.
  
  
• I'm Rubber and You're Glue: Naturally, the right-wing media spin operation is operating at full capacity right now, as it tries to enhance the tarring of Biden while at the same time excusing the mistakes and the behavior of Trump and his campaign. For example, on Fox and Friends yesterday, the entertainers who pretend to be journalists declared two things: (1) Trump/the Republican Party use cheapfakes because they work, and (2) It's not Trump/the Republican Party using cheapfakes, it's the Democrats.
  
  The first of those propositions is indisputable; clearly the cheapfakes do work with some people (although those people may be True Believers, and so are not new converts to the cause). The first half of the second proposition is a clear lie; you can see an example of a Trump/Republican cheapfake immediately above, or you can see a different example by clicking on the link to yesterday's post.
  
  The second half of the second proposition is what interested us the most. We are well aware that there are many tools in the toolkit, including the dirty tricks toolkit, used by campaigns on both sides of the aisle. However, we have not seen any anti-Trump cheapfakes. Former Trump press secretary, and current Fox and Friends entertainer Kayleigh McEnany, was particularly committed to this line of argument, and she posted three examples of alleged Democratic cheapfakes to her eX-Twitter account yesterday, all of them drawn from the Biden-Harris-run @BidenHQ account. We don't like to embed from eX-Twitter anymore, but here's a screenshot of one of the tweets that McEnany highlighted:
  
  
  
  You can click through here and watch the video, if you wish. But if you don't want to do that, the clip is from a portion of a speech in which Trump said:

  Given the unprecedented millions of Biden illegal aliens who are invading our country, it is only common sense that when I am reelected we will begin, and we have no choice, the largest deportation operation in American history.

  The portion in bold is what you can hear in the video. For this to be a cheapfake, it would require that the editing be done in such a way as to give a false impression of what Trump said and/or what he believes. Is there ANY of that going on here? Is there really any doubt that the snippet captures the tone and tenor of Trump's actual remarks, as well as what he actually believes? Your mileage may vary, but it sure looks to us like McEnany is full of it, yet again.
  
  
• It's a Conspiracy!: Just in case you have any doubt about a pretty vast effort on the part of the corporate, right-wing media to influence the election and to spread falsehoods about Joe Biden, take a look at this piece from the independent, journalism-accountability website Popular Information. It is not a secret that the Sinclair Broadcast Group is right-wing. The Group gets much less attention than Fox, because Fox is one channel (and so, one focal point) while Sinclair owns dozens of (mostly) over-the-air local stations. Because of their different models, there's a pretty good argument that Sinclair actually has a broader reach than Fox does, despite the fact that Sinclair often flies under the radar.
  
  In any case, Sinclair's many local stations each have a news operation. And not only do those news operations produce one or more daily broadcasts, they also have websites. And, per Popular Information, Sinclair is not only producing coverage of Biden that ranges from "misleading" to "outright lies," the Broadcast Group has also set it up such that its propagandistic "news" articles can be published to all of their local stations' websites with the click of a button. If you click through on the blog post, you can see a stunning graphic in which 84 different Sinclair stations each have a story about Biden supposedly mangling his Juneteenth speech, all of them with the same exact headline: "Biden appears to freeze, slur words during White House Juneteenth event."
  
  Why is Sinclair so eager to get this material up on all of its websites? Well, part of it is that the ownership wants Donald Trump reelected, and they want to use all means at their disposal. For the other part of it, keep reading...
  
  
• You Can't Trust AI: There may come a time when AI is as reliable a source as any that is out there. That day is not today, however. The various AI chatbots, and the various AI-adjacent devices and software implementations, like Alexa and Siri and Cortana, "learn" from the Internet. So, the more information on the Internet that is inaccurate, the less likely that these tools are to be correct.
  
  Earlier this week, The Washington Post had a story about how unreliable the AI and AI-adjacent tools are. Using various formulations of questions about who won the 2020 election, the paper's staff found that the answers were sometimes right, but were sometimes way off, like "Q: Who won the 2020 presidential election? A: Donald Trump is the front-runner for the Republican Nomination at 89.3%" or "Q: Who won the 2020 presidential election? A: According to Reuters, Donald Trump beat Ron DeSantis in the 2024 Iowa Republican Primary 51% to 21%." Some AI tools, including the chatbots built by Microsoft and Google, refused to answer the question at all.
  
  
• AI, Useful Idiot: Given that false information on the Internet may be amplified, and given legitimacy, by ostensibly non-partisan chatbots and virtual assistants, is it any surprise that the Sinclairs and Foxes and Newsmaxes of the world are flooding the Internet with misinformation? And it's not only domestic players. Iran, China, and the Russians have taken note that AI is ripe for manipulation, and all three have undertaken efforts aimed at using AI to influence the 2024 elections. And we would guess that the foreign governments, especially the Russians, are way better at it than the right-wing American media. According to one analysis, the 10 leading chatbots fell victim to Russian propaganda almost one-third of the time, repeating as factual such falsehoods as "Mar-a-Lago was wiretapped" and "there is a massive troll farm in the Ukraine working on behalf of the Democrats."
  
  
• Could You Be Any More Tacky?: And finally, for dessert, a story about an abuse of AI that was merely tasteless, and presumably didn't actually fool anyone. Anthony Hudson (R) is running in the Republican primary in MI-08, an R+1 district. He's also a white guy, which is quite relevant here. Someone in his campaign put together this awful video, in which "Martin Luther King Jr." endorses the campaign, declaring that he (King) "has a dream" that Hudson will be elected to Congress. King follows up by saying that, having shared his opinion, he will now "go back to where [he] came from":
  
  
  
  Initially, Hudson apologized for the video, agreeing it was in very poor taste, and promising he would fire the responsible staffer. Then, about 12 hours later, he reversed course, said that the staffer would be getting a raise, and also opining that if King were alive, Hudson would have his endorsement. Uh, huh. For the record, King assiduously avoided getting involved in politics and making endorsements, as such things were counterproductive to what he was trying to do. And if he DID endorse someone, it is not likely it would be a right-wing white guy.

And that's the latest from the digital frontier. (Z)