Former President Promotes Fringe Theory About Crowds at Kamala Harris Rallies ⇥ nytimes.com

Shane Goldmacher, New York Times:

Former President Donald J. Trump has taken his obsession with the large crowds that Vice President Kamala Harris is drawing at her rallies to new heights, falsely declaring in a series of social media posts on Sunday that she had used artificial intelligence to create images and videos of fake crowds.

The A.I.-generated crowds claim is something I had seen bouncing around the fringes of X — and by “fringe”, I mean accounts which have paid to amplify their posts. I did not expect a claim this stupid to become a mainstream argument. But then I remembered what the mainstream looks like these days.

This claim is so stupid because you do not need to rely on the photos released by the campaign. You can just go look up pictures for yourself, taken at a bunch of different angles by a bunch of different people with consistent lighting, logical crowds, and realistic hands. There are hundreds of them, and videos too. A piece of supposed evidence for the fakery is that Harris’ plane does not have a visible tail number, but there are — again — plenty of pictures of that plane which show no number. The U.S. Air Force made the change last year.

I know none of the people promoting this theory are interested in facts. They began with a conclusion and are creating a story to fit, in spite of evidence to the contrary. Still, it was equal parts amusing and worrisome to see this theory be spun from whole cloth in real time.