Recently, Donald Trump fans in Florida and Michigan have been auto-generating and spreading around faked “pictures” of Trump surrounded by crowds of Black supporters—and earning significant traction for doing so. Coming at a time when President Joe Biden is worried about losing the Black voters who came out for his 2020 election, the Trump images have become a whole new subgenre of A.I. sludge. And no one in any position of power appears to know what to do about it.

Last month, BBC Panorama reported on the proliferation of these deceitful likenesses. The first example displayed Trump at a Christmas party with his arm around a couple of Black women, one of whom is seen wearing a Pen & Pixel–style tank; another shows him sitting on a house porch with six young Black men, smiling with his hands clasped. Both images gained substantial traction on Facebook, sans disclosure that they were A.I.-generated, and were misleadingly appended as context for stories on Trump’s increasing appeal to Black voters.

These fakes, made with popular artificial intelligence tools, have become more and more common. Last August, shortly after Elon Musk revoked Twitter’s ban of Dom Lucre—a far-right conspiracist and peddler of child sexual abuse imagery—the fringe influencer shared a hazy “photo” of Trump at a Black-hosted cookout and asked, “Why is Obama never in the hood?” Even for the misinformation-choked social platform, this was a bit much, and the image earned a Community Note pointing out that it was A.I.-generated.

But other such shares did not earn the same scrutiny. The Center for Countering Digital Hate, which recently beat back a meritless lawsuit from Musk, found in a report released last month that the cookout image was first crafted and posted by @Trump_History45, a parody account that specializes in prompting up deepfakes of Trump with various historical figures (including but not limited to Martin Luther King Jr., the Notorious B.I.G., Bob Marley, and Nelson........

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