Donald Trump is trying to brush off the fact that he shared A.I.-generated images of Taylor Swift endorsing his campaign to his Truth Social account earlier this week, now claiming that he doesn’t know “anything about them.”
“I don’t know anything about them, other than somebody else generated them,” Trump told Fox Business correspondent Gary Trimble after his campaign event in Asheboro, North Carolina, on Wednesday. “I didn’t generate them.”
One fabricated image shared by Trump of the notoriously litigious pop star had Swift clad in red, white, and blue, posing like Uncle Sam before an American flag emblazoned with the text: “Taylor wants YOU to vote for Donald Trump.”
“I accept!” Trump captioned the image.
Another Swift-related post shared by the former president depicted a group of women marching in “Swifties for Trump” shirts (the post was labeled satire by its creator).
If Trump truly can’t tell the difference between an A.I. generated image and a genuine photograph, especially one that’s doctored to illustrate a campaign endorsement, then that’s a significant problem. But it’s far from the only A.I.-generated image that Trump has shared in recent weeks. Shortly after he began posting to his Twitter account—the first time he’d done so in earnest since the January 6 riot—the former president shared an A.I.-generated video of himself and X owner Elon Musk dancing.
Still, Trump warned Trimble, “A.I. is always very dangerous.”
“Somebody came out. They said, ‘Oh look at this,’” Trump attempted to explain to the reporter on Wednesday. “These were all made up by other people. A.I. is always very dangerous in that way.”
It’s not the first time this summer that Trump has obsessed over Swift. During a closed-door meeting between Trump and House Republicans in June—his first visit to Capitol Hill since before the January 6 insurrection—Trump insisted on discussing the pop phenom, lamenting that she might endorse President Joe Biden while he was still in the race. Days before the meeting, Variety reported that Trump had spoken at length about Swift in a one-on-one interview, describing her as “unusually beautiful.”
