Trump’s tricky new use of AI

When Barack Obama mocked Donald Trump’s “weird obsession with crowd sizes” at the Democratic National Convention this week, the audience went wild, and the internet made the moment go viral. But on Trump’s end, something else was also going on when he made his (false) assertions that Kamala Harris used artificial intelligence to inflate the crowd sizes in images of her rallies. AI might not have blown up politics the way some people worried it was going to. But Trump has seized on the new technology in a typically out-of-the-box way: As an easy way to sow doubt about basic facts. “When he’s denying these images of Harris’ crowds, you could think, ‘Wow, it’s just pettiness,” said Hany Farid, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley who focuses on media forensics. “But I think it’s worse than that, because I think he’s setting the stage for denying the election.” Farid is not the only one who thinks this.