Musk’s Deepfake of Harris Prompts Backlash Depicting X’s Owner as a Nazi

Who’d have thought posting an AI-generated fake image of Vice President Kamala Harris striking a dictatorial pose while dressed in a red communist-style uniform would be a bad idea? Most logical-thinking humans on the planet, perhaps. But not Elon Musk, the increasingly petulant owner of X, who did exactly that on Monday. 

Musk’s social blast followed a weekend campaign tweet from Harris that shared a poster image of Donald Trump vowing to be a “dictator on day one” if re-elected. Trump made this statement in an interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity in December 2023. Since then, the former president and campaign staffers have tried to walk back the inflammatory rhetoric, claiming it was in jest, or that it was a remark to try to trigger left-leaning people.

Apparently, Harris’s new tweet upset right-leaning Musk enough to prompt his deepfaked image post. Musk accompanied the troubling deepfake image with some fact-inverting text worthy of the reality-distorting newspeak tactics in Orwell’s 1984: “Kamala vows to be a communist dictator on day one. Can you believe she wears that outfit!” he said. It’s impossible to tell if the post was intended to be humorous.

Many X users were not amused, and broadly denounced Musk’s post. Some users were so outraged they took to X to post similar deepfaked images, including some of Trump posed as a communist leader, The Independent newspaper reported. One account posted an AI image of Musk in a Nazi uniform, labeling him “Apartheid Clyde” and accusing him of spreading misinformation–with an added note saying “Thank Grok!” Grok is X’s proprietary generative AI system, supposedly designed to be irreverent and with few safety protocols or restrictions on content.

This contrasts sharply with other big generative AI systems like Google’s Gemini. Google got ensnared in a scandal earlier this year when Gemini users found they could prompt the AI to make culturally and historically inappropriate and racist images of people, forcing Google to disable parts of its AI systems. Grok has no such safety barriers, enabling use of Musk’s own platform to generate provocative images–which proved to be a double-edged sword in the latest battle of dueling deepfakes.

Musk spawned similar controversy when he recently retweeted more deepfake content relating to Harris–this time a video doctored with a fake voice sounding like Harris’s own, spewing words that attacked President Biden. Critics said that by not labeling this material as AI-generated, Musk could be violating X’s own terms and conditions. His new deepfake image seems to clearly contradict the platform’s “synthetic and manipulated media” rules, which state that users “may not share synthetic, manipulated, or out-of-context media that may deceive or confuse people and lead to harm.” 

Meanwhile, another controversy revolving around X and its recent ban in Brazil is brewing. It too involves Kamala Harris. 

X has been inaccessible in Brazil since the weekend after a months-long legal spat in which Musk refused to comply with Brazilian officials’ demands that he take down posts sharing misinformation about Brazil’s election process. Now the Associated Press reports that some social media users are deliberately misrepresenting a years-old video of Harris, trying to claim that she has threatened to censor both X and Elon Musk.

The original 2019 video actually shows Harris talking with CNN host Jake Tapper after a Democratic primary debate, and the two are in discussions about Trump’s blustery rhetoric published on X–then still known as Twitter. The discussion included debate over whether Trump should be removed from X because of his incitement of public violence. Twitter did suspend Trump’s account, until Musk reinstated it in November 2022 after he’d bought the social media platform. 

In the newly shared clips, users are using segments of the video to claim Harris will close down X if she wins the presidential vote. Some users are also using the clip to imply Harris was supporting the Brazilian X ban.

AP fact-checkers called these accusations untrue. But the posts did garner attention from former independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who appears to have fallen for the out-of-context video material hook, line, and sinker. 

Things are only going to get weirder, it seems–Musk shows no signs of modifying his antics. ​We can only wonder what AI deepfaked ridiculousness will come next.