DeSantis War Room Deepfake Attack on Trump Lays Bare AI Threat to Elections

A "DeSantis War Room" campaign video appeared to mock former U.S. president and current Republican frontrunner Donald Trump for "not firing" the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Anthony Fauci during his time in office.

However, digital forensics experts and fact checkers found that at least some of the images featured in the ad, including one appearing to show Trump embracing Fauci, appeared to be deepfakes likely generated with the help of artificial intelligence and machine-learning software.

The case adds to the concerns about the use of ChatGPT, Midjourney and other AI-based content generating tools to create and disseminate misinformation targeting the 2024 and future elections, which Newsweek reported on in the past.

Newsweek Misinformation Watch looked into the misleading elements featured in the video, assessing what it means for U.S. elections and political discourse going forward.

On June 5, 2023, the Blue-ticked twitter account "DeSantis War Room" shared a video, which has received nearly 200,000 views since then.

"Donald Trump became a household name by FIRING countless people *on television*," the caption said. "But when it came to Fauci..."

The post included a 44-second campaign ad that took aim at Donald Trump and his relationship with Fauci, who has been a frequent target of attacks by conservative media, and commentators criticizing the U.S. Covid response and policy decisions.

DeSantis War Room is the presidential candidate's "rapid response Twitter operation," according to its bio. It is not clear whether it is directly affiliated to or run by the DeSantis campaign, or if the clip was approved by DeSantis himself.

The video appeared to juxtapose footage of Trump telling contestants "You're fired" as host of his reality TV show The Apprentice against clips of him talking about the decision to keep Fauci in his post as the head of the CDC's U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

Although Fauci retired in December 2022, he has continued to face accusations of mismanagement and cover-ups, and is still a frequent target of COVID and anti-vaccine conspiracy theories.

DeSantis' campaign video appeared to foment some of the anger directed toward Fauci into the attack on the Florida governor's GOP primary rival, with soundbites of Trump stating that firing Fauci would lead to a "firestorm" and would be akin to dropping a "bomb."

Mixed in with the legitimate (if somewhat decontextualized) video fragments and interview clips, a number of images briefly appear, which are not in fact genuine, but artificially created "deepfakes."

As fact-checkers at Agence-France Press (AFP) established, while three of the photos seen in the collage are authentic—as evidenced by Getty Images, the National Institutes of Health and Reuters—others appear to have been generated with the aid of AI.

Those include ones in which Trump appears to embrace Fauci and kiss him on the cheek, a scene apparently captured from different angles. Three digital forensics analysts told AFP that the images display "irregular characteristics typical of those produced by AI."

"For example, if you look closely at Donald Trump's hair in the top-left, bottom-middle, and bottom-right images, you can see that it contains inconsistent textures and is significantly blurrier than other nearby content such as his ears or other regions of his face," Matthew Stamm, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at Drexel University in Pennsylvania told the agency.

Another apparent red flag is the text seen under the White House image on the left of the picture. As Newsweek's guide to spotting AI-generated misinformation noted, one of the current challenges for tools such as Midjourney is text generation, meaning that any visible signs could give away the artificial nature of the image.

As Newsweek explained in the article, while such images can be quite easily debunked as fake by zooming in, that proves to be much harder to do with low-resolution images, such as ones included in a collage.

"They're deepfakes, and they're not particularly good ones," Ben Colman, co-founder and CEO of Reality Defender, a platform that uses AI to track down and debunk deepfakes and machine learning-based misinformation.

"Our platform found some of them to be face swaps and the rest to be diffusion images."

Colman also noted other examples of deepfake use in politics in recent weeks, including ones involving the two GOP primary frontrunners.

Earlier this year Trump posted on his social-media site Truth Social what appeared to be an AI-generated video of Morgan DeSantis's awkward campaign launch on Twitter, with George Soros, Adolf Hitler and Satan digitally added to the list of guests.

"We've seen the Trump team deepfake DeSantis into known popular works, the Republican party uses generative content to show a purported future Biden-created hellscape, and Trump himself share deepfakes of CNN journalist Anderson Cooper," Colman told Newsweek via email.

The latest case stokes fears that disruptive digital technologies and AI-generated content could undermine the integrity of elections and create chaos in the U.S.

"With the 2024 election over a year away, we're bound to see more deepfakes of this nature in June alone. We're seeing content of this nature across all social platforms, as they don't take any measures to proactively detect for deepfakes, nor do they have a strict policy in preventing this type of content.

"Platforms can implement proactive deepfake detection to prevent users from seeing content spreading misinformation and disinformation, but no laws exist requiring them to do so," he explained.

The issue of AI-infused misinformation was brought to national attention in March, 2023, when fake images of the "arrest" of Donald Trump went viral.

The images were in fact deepfakes, created by British investigative journalist Eliot Higgins in order to showcase the serious danger that AI tools pose to society.

Newsweek has reached out to the DeSantis and Trump campaigns for comment via email.