Washington: President Donald Trump dismissed on Monday the reaction against an image generated by AI as the Pope published by the White House on social networks, saying that it was a harmless joke, but the communications experts said they did not see the fun side.
The stalls generated by Trump’s weekend AI dressed in white papal clothing and another wielding one of the red light sabers preferred by the villains in the Star Wars films seemed typical of the provocation that the president uses to energize the followers and critics of the Troll.
Since he returned to January 20, Trump has dominated the news cycles. In a relatively quiet weekend, the two images assured that Trump maintained an important topic of conversation on social networks and beyond.
Throughout his political career, Trump has adopted bold images, from posing in a garbage truck to stop outside a church during protests against police brutality. But experts told Reuters that, unlike those rooted in reality, images of the facts and fiction blur so that it can deceive.
“I think we are seeing a new phenomenon: the fusion of social networks and the power of AI, organized for political power and narrative domain,” said John Wihbey, director of the Ai-Media strategies laboratory in Northeastern University in Boston.
“This unknown territory is exploiting,” Wihbey said. “I suspect that politicians around the world will begin to use generative and social together again.”
Trump told journalists on Monday that the Pope’s image was published as a joke in his social account of truth, which was later replaced by the White House on social networks.
“It had nothing to do with that,” Trump said. “It was alone, someone made it fun. It’s fine. Do you have to have fun a little, right?”
The White House did not answer the questions about who, apart from Trump, publishes in his social account of truth and who created the two memes.
For many Catholics in the United States, Italy and in other places, Trump’s image dressed as a representative of God on earth was offensive.
The former Italian prime minister, Matteo Renzi, wrote in X: “This is an image that offends believers, insults institutions and shows that the leader of global law enjoys being a clown.”
The Democratic strategist Michael Ceraso saw the publication of the images of the White House as a deliberate attempt to generate hum.
“He is the first president of influencer,” Ceraso said about Trump, urging the Democrats not to be trapped in whipped controversies.
Trump, he said, takes his signals from the professional struggle: “You can be the bad guy or the good guy, as long as you have a reaction of the crowd.”
Since he became president, Trump has published images generated by a complex against the sea in Gaza with the war war and himself as king and as a gangster type Al Capone.
Danger ahead
Jennifer Mercieca, scholar of presidential rhetoric at the University of Texas A&M in College Station, Texas, argued that Trump was trying to project images of force at a time when his presidential approval index is decreasing.
“Trump’s policies are unpopular, and their presidency is unpopular,” said Mercieca. “Within this context, Trump has created a visual fantasy of himself as a hero, trying to persuade the nation (and the world) that he is, in fact, a hero.”
The most recent Reuters/Ipsos survey had Trump’s approval classification in 42% with 53% of respondents who disapproved and showed concerns among Americans about their economic and immigrant policies. Its maximum point to 47% in the first days of its presidency.
Wihbey, from the University of the Northeast, said that a greater proof of the AI ability to deform political reality will occur if Trump tries to insert himself in more “photorealist” images that suggest historical events and scenes that did not occur.
