Washington (AFP) – Fake AI-generated photos and videos purporting to show Donald Trump and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein socializing with underage girls have flooded social media, racking up millions of views, researchers said Friday. The surge in deepfakes comes as the US president — frequently photographed with Epstein during their 15-year friendship — attempts to distance himself from the disgraced financier, who died in jail in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges.
One widely circulated AI-generated video appears to show Trump and Epstein leering at a group of young girls dancing, with the song “Is it a Crime?” by the English band Sade added as background music. At least two other fake photos appear to show the pair on a couch alongside underage girls. Another such photograph purports to show Trump dancing with a teenage girl on Epstein’s private island. Overlaying the image is the caption: “Trump was in his 50’s when this was taken. What kind of man does that?”
At least seven such AI-generated images and one video cumulatively garnered more than 7.2 million views across social media platforms, according to a conservative estimate by disinformation watchdog group NewsGuard. The watchdog said it used multiple detection tools, including Hive and IdentifAI, to establish that the content was fabricated using AI tools and the actual number of views was likely much higher than its manual tally of high-engagement posts.
Trump’s ties to Epstein are extensive, and the pair were frequently pictured partying together during their friendship before they fell out in 2004 over a property deal. But there appear to be no known authentic photographs of the pair with underage girls or of Trump visiting Epstein’s private island in the Caribbean, NewsGuard said.
AI slop — low-quality visual content generated using cheap and widely available artificial intelligence tools – increasingly appears to be flooding social media sites, blurring the lines between reality and fiction. Many content creators on YouTube and TikTok offer paid courses on how to monetize viral AI slop on tech platforms, many of which have reduced their reliance on human fact-checkers and scaled back content moderation.
AI-generated images of Trump spread rapidly after the FBI and Justice Department said in a July 7 memo that there was no proof that Epstein kept a “client list” of elite co-conspirators as conspiracy theorists have contended. Trump’s core Make America Great Again (MAGA) base erupted in anger over the memo, calling on the White House to release the so-called “Epstein files.” Some even within the Republican president’s own party have demanded the files be released, but his administration has declined to do so.
Fake images appear to be gaining traction in that vacuum. The Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday that the president’s name was among hundreds found during an official review of the files, though there has not been evidence of wrongdoing. Trump filed a $10 billion defamation suit against the newspaper last week after it reported that he had penned a sexually suggestive letter to Epstein for his 50th birthday in 2003.
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