DEVELOPING Defence rests without Donald Trump taking the witness stand in his New York hush money trial
Donald Trump's lawyers rested their defence Tuesday without the former president taking the witness stand in his New York hush money trial.
The presidential campaign for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis released a video on social media that appears to use images generated by artificial intelligence to depict former President Donald Trump hugging Dr. Anthony Fauci.
The images were included in a video posted Monday that first shows Trump as host of the reality TV show “The Apprentice” firing people and then pivots to sound bites of Trump praising Fauci and explaining why he could not fire the former head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. At one point, the audio is laid over pictures of Trump and Fauci, including several of the two men appearing to embrace. The words “Real Life Trump” are transposed over the images.
Some of the images, however, carry the hallmarks of AI-generated content. None of those pictures yielded a match through a Google reverse image search. In one picture, purportedly of Trump and Fauci clutching one another in the White House briefing room, the lettering on the wall is jumbled, a sign that the image was created using an AI program. Trump and Fauci also look somewhat cartoonish in those pictures.
Hany Farid, a digital forensic expert and a professor at the University of California, Berkeley’s School of Information, agreed that the images in the ad were AI-generated, noting the nonsensical text in the image supposedly from the briefing room.
“This type of semantic inconsistency is still a weakness of generative AI,” Farid said. “These problems, however, will eventually get resolved and we can expect generative-AI images to become increasingly more difficult to distinguish from reality. This is not the first use of generative AI in the upcoming election, and it certainly won’t be the last. Buckle up.”
A person with the DeSantis campaign told CNN that the video was a social media post, not a paid advertisement, and pointed out that members of Trump’s team had also used fake or doctored images in the past.
On Thursday afternoon, Twitter appended a community note to the post—a contributor-led feature to highlight misinformation on the social media platform—alerting the site’s users that in the video “3 still shots showing Trump embracing Fauci are AI generated images. The remainder of the ad’s recordings and images are authentic.”
Ohio Sen. JD Vance, a Republican who has endorsed Trump, seemed to criticize the video Thursday on Twitter, writing: “Smearing Donald Trump with fake AI images is completely unacceptable. I’m not sharing them, but we’re in a new era. Be even more skeptical of what you see on the internet.”
Trump, though, has also generated blowback in the past for posting doctored images and videos. During the 2020 presidential campaign, Trump retweeted to his followers a video of Joe Biden at a rally playing a song for the crowd on his phone. In the real version, Biden plays “Despacito,” but the video Trump shared replaced it with N.W.A.’s famous anti-police anthem.
After DeSantis’ botched campaign announcement on Twitter spaces, Trump posted a fake version of the announcement which included Adolf Hitler and featured Trump crashing the digital event to say a few words. In May, Trump’s son Donald Trump, Jr. shared a video of a scene from “The Office” of Michael Scott wearing a woman’s suit, however, the video was doctored to put DeSantis’ face on Steve Carell’s character.
The video also comes weeks after a super PAC supporting DeSantis, Never Back Down, released a video of DeSantis that was edited to add fighter jets flying over the candidate after a speech.
Donald Trump's lawyers rested their defence Tuesday without the former president taking the witness stand in his New York hush money trial.
One passenger was killed and 30 injured after a Singapore Airlines SIAL.SI flight from London hit severe turbulence en route on Tuesday, forcing it to make an emergency landing in Bangkok, officials and the airline said.
Anything is possible this week, as far as Canada's weather is concerned, with forecasts ranging from scorching heat in some parts of the country to rain and snow in others.
Canada's annual inflation rate slowed to a three-year low of 2.7 per cent in April, matching expectations, and core measures continued to ease, data showed on Tuesday, likely boosting chances of a June interest rate cut.
Riley Keough, the granddaughter of Elvis Presley, is fighting plans to publicly auction his Graceland estate in Memphis after a company tried to sell the property based on claims that a loan using the king of rock ’n’ roll's former home as collateral was not repaid.
Donald Trump's reelection campaign called 'The Apprentice,' a film about the former U.S. president in the 1980s, 'pure fiction' and vowed legal action following its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival. But director Ali Abbasi is offering to privately screen the film for Trump.
Nestle NESN.S will market a new, US$5 line of frozen pizzas and protein-enriched pastas in the United States which it says it designed specifically for people taking drugs such as Wegovy or Ozempic for weight loss.
If you've been to a party lately and haven't seen someone drinking a BORG, you're likely not partying with college students.
As the month-long boycott of Loblaw-owned stores wears on, small independent food retailers and alternative grocery options say they're seeing a boost in traffic and sales.
For those who go to their local libraries often, they know there’s much more to their library than just borrowing books. Local libraries in Atlantic Canada are now renting out a broader range of items for people.
Flashes of purple darting across the sky mixed with the serenading sound of songs will be noticed more with spring in full force in Manitoba.
Catching 'em all with impressive speed, a 7-year-old boy from Windsor, Ont. who only started his competitive Pokémon journey seven months ago has already levelled up to compete at a world championship level.
A sanctuary dedicated to animals with disabilities is celebrating the third birthday of one of its most popular residents.
2b Theatre recently moved into the old Video Difference building, seeking to transform it into an artistic hub, meeting space, and temporary housing unit for visiting performers in Halifax.
A B.C. woman says her service dog pulled her from a lake moments before she had a seizure, saving her life.
A Starbucks fan — whose name is Winter — is visiting Canada on a purposeful journey that began with a random idea at one of the coffee chain's stores in Texas.
Members of Piapot First Nation, students from the University of Winnipeg and various other professionals are learning new techniques that will hopefully be used for ground searches of potential unmarked grave sites in the future.
ALS patient Mathew Brown said he’s hopeful for future ALS patients after news this week of research at Western University of a potential cure for ALS.