Happy Tuesday, all! Here’s your Tuesday Tech Drop, the top news at the intersection of tech and politics from the past week.
Trump’s fake Black backers
The BBC is out with a new report this week on Trump supporters who’ve been using artificial intelligence to generate images of Trump appearing friendly with nonexistent Black people. Despite Trump’s history of demonstrable racism (consider his “poisoning the blood of our country” rhetoric, just to pick a recent example), he and his supporters have been trying to play up his support among Black people. That it has come to making fake pictures to convey that message seems pretty pitiful. The BBC spoke with a white, conservative radio host named Mark Kaye who created one of the images. He explained, “I’m not out there taking pictures of what’s really happening. I’m a storyteller.”
Here’s the image Kaye and his team created:
The story Kaye and others like him appear to be telling through these dubious images is of a man beloved by Black people, despite his long list of overtly anti-Black acts. I’m pretty confident these fake images won’t work to sway Black voters. Trump has been pictured with various (actual, living) Black folks over the years and that doesn’t appear to have helped him win Black voters by any large measure. But this is just the latest, troubling example of artificial intelligence being deployed in a way that seems designed to dupe people.
Read more at the BBC.
Here are some other stories I’ve been following:
A new app-roach
Get to know Superfeed, the organization run by Tyler Bowyer, an executive with the right-wing group Turning Point USA. The group has a new app it’s trying to sell the Republican Party. NBC News previously reported that some in the GOP see the app, which has been pitched as a tool for canvassing and campaign organizing, as a way for TPUSA — in the words of one anonymous RNC member — “to hoodwink people to build their data operation.” The Daily Beast has a new…
Read the full article here
