Does this derogatory phrase have just used by Trump becoming the new one?

Artificial intelligence is apparently the new “false news.”

To blame AI is an increasingly popular strategy for politicians who seek to dodge the responsibility of something shameful, among others.

Ai is not a person, after all. It cannot be leaked or archive suit. It makes mistakes, a credibility problem that makes it difficult to determine the fact of fiction in the era of misinformation.

And when the truth is difficult to discern, the false benefit, the analysts say. The phenomenon is widely known as “the liar’s dividend.”

On Tuesday, President Donald Trump supported the practice. When asked about the viral images that show someone taking something out through a white house window from the top of the floor, the president replied: “No, that is probably AI”, after his press team told journalists that the video was real.

But Trump, known for insisting that the truth is what he says is, he declared himself in the phenomenon of Ai-Blaming.

“If something happens, that’s really bad,” he told reporters, “maybe I will only have to blame AI.”

He is not alone.

Via News

The AI ​​is blamed, sometimes fairly, sometimes not

On the same day in Caracas, Venezuelan Minister of Communications, Freddy Ñáñez, questioned the veracity of a video of the Trump administration that, he said, showed an American strike in a ship in the Caribbean that went to the train gang of Aragua of Venezuela and killed 11. A video of the strike published in the truth shows a long boat of Venezuela in the velocity Flash of light of light. The boat looks briefly covered with flames.

“Based on the video provided, it is very likely that it has been created using artificial intelligence,” Ñáñez said in his telegram account, which describes “almost caricaturesco animation.”

To blame AI can sometimes be a compliment. (“It’s like a player generated by AI,” said tennis player Alexander Bublik about the talent of the open opponent of the United States Jannik Sinner in ESPN). But when the powerful use it, practice, experts say, can be dangerous.

The expert in digital forensic Hany Farid warned for years about the growing capabilities of AI “Deepfake” videos and videos to help in political fraud or misinformation campaigns, but there was always a deeper problem.

“I have always argued that the broader problem is that when you enter this world where anything can be false, so it has nothing to be real,” said Farid, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. “You can deny any reality because everything you have to say is: ‘It is a deep defake.”

That was not so ago one or two decades, he said. Trump issued a rare apology (“if someone offended”) in 2016 for his comments about touching women without their consent in the notorious “Access Hollywood” tape. His opponent, Democrat Hillary Clinton, said she was wrong to call some of her followers “a deplorable basket.”

Toby Walsh, chief scientist and professor at the University of Nueva Wales del Sur in Sydney, said that blaming AI leads to problems not only in the digital world but also in the real world.

“It leads to a dark future in which we no longer hold politicians (or any other person),” Walsh said in an email. “” It used to be that if they caught you on a tape saying something, I had to own. This is no longer the case. “

Contemplating the ‘liar dividend’

Danielle K. Citron of the Law Faculty of the University of Boston and Robert Chesney of the University of Texas provided the subject in the research published in 2019. In it, they describe what they called “the dividend of liars.”

“If the public loses faith in what they listen and come and the truth becomes a matter of opinion, then power flows to those whose opinions are more prominent: the incorporating authorities on the road,” they wrote in California Law Review. “A skeptical audience will be prepared to doubt the authenticity of real audio and video evidence.”

Surveys suggest that many Americans distrust AI. About half of us, adults said that the greatest use of AI in daily life made them feel “more worried than excited,” according to a PEW Research Center survey since August 2024.

PEW’s survey indicates that people have worried more about the greatest use of AI in recent years.

Mehmet Eser through Getty Images

Most American adults seem to distrust the information generated by AI when they know that this is the source, according to a April Quinnipiac survey. Around three quarters said they could only trust the information generated by AI “sometimes” or “almost never.” In that survey, about 6 out of 10 American adults said they were “very worried” by the political leaders who used AI to distribute false or misleading information.

Trump’s misinformation story is even to adapt to his narrative is prior to AI. It is famous for the use of “false news”, a term of rumors now widely known for denoting skepticism about media reports. Leslie Stahl of “60 minute” of News has said that Trump told him out of the camera in 2016 that he tries to “discredit” journalists so that when they denounce negative stories, they are not created.

Trump’s statement on Tuesday that AI was behind the video of the White House window was not his first attempt to blame AI. In 2023, he insisted that the Lincoln Anti-Trump project used in a video to see “look bad.”

In the place entitled “Weak”, a narrator mocks Trump. “Hello Donald … you are weak. You seem unstable. You need help to move.” She questions her “virility”, accompanied by an image of two blue pills. The video continues with Trump images stumbling with words.

“The perverts and losers in the failed Lincoln project and once drawn, and others, are using AI (artificial intelligence) in their false television commercials to make me look as bad and pathetic as Joe Biden,” Trump published in Truth Social.

The Lincoln project told News at the time that AI was not used in place.

News Ali Swenson writers in New York, Matt O’Brien in Providence, Rhode Island, Linley Sanders in Washington and Jorge Rueda in Caracas, Venezuela, contributed to this report.