To take president Donald Trump’s word for it, America’s cities are in ruins, forcing him to deploy federal troops to Portland, Washington DC, and Memphis.
There’s just one wrinkle — no one seems to be able to find any real evidence of the mass riots and anarchist violence that Trump and his supporters insist is destroying the nation. Luckily for them, that problem is easily solved with a little help from AI.
The phenomenon was first flagged by Gizmodo, which reported a concerning rise in AI-generated pro-Trump propaganda since the release of OpenAI’s Sora 2, an AI video generator capable of spitting out short, nearly photorealistic clips.
For example, Giz notes how one clip, showing a protestor harassing a US national guardsman before getting pepper sprayed, went viral on Instagram, notching nearly 1.5 million likes and over 40 million views. Most of the comments seem oblivious to the fact it was bearing a Sora watermark.
“Best video I saw Today , [sic] let’s see more of those scum bags being taken down,” wrote one user. “I love a feel good video like this,” enthused another.
And a poster on X-formerly-Twitter uploaded a AI-generated video montage of various protestors hollering in police officers’ faces. “No Queso! No cheese!” they heckle, a mocking variation on a popular protest chant, before getting blasted in the face with mace. “Lmfao, that was beautiful and before you ask I voted for this!” the caption reads.
In each case, the unruly crowd is decked out in black attire — a stereotype playing on the black bloc protest tactic — and angrily spitting at the heavily militarized officers, who remain stoic before they attack with chemical spray.
It’s a fascinating look into the effort to drum up consent for an unprecedented crackdown on American cities, a campaign Trump happily calls a “war.”
As Giz points out, the whole thing is especially noteworthy given that violent crime in the US is in reality at the lowest it’s been in decades. And while urban areas are typically known as havens for progressive activists, the throngs of violent revolutionaries the White House has made its cause du jour simply don’t seem to exist. (There is plenty of violence on America’s streets, to be clear, but there’s no evidence that it’s coming from the left at any disproportionate scale.)
As such, Trump’s deployment of national guard troops to DC is telling. After their deployment, the guardsmen quickly ran out of fictional anarchist cells to topple, and were instead put to work cleaning up trash at a cost of over $1 million per day.
How long this circus can go on for is anyone’s guess — but with AI tools like Sora setting the stage, it might be a while.
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