The Trump White House has firmly dismissed as fake a viral image appearing to show Donald Trump kissing a woman on a golf course, whom social media users suggested was White House aide Natalie Harp.
“This is clearly a fake photo,” a White House official told the Daily Beast on Wednesday.
Two versions of the image circulated on social media this week, one blurry and the other considerably sharper. They quickly went viral amid growing scrutiny of Trump’s relationship with Harp, to whom the president, it recently emerged, gave a $45,000 cash gift. Fact-checking website Snopes’s detailed analysis of the pictures concluded it “could find no credible evidence or source supporting the authenticity of the image.”
The “higher-resolution version had telltale signs of artificial intelligence, such as hands with too many fingers, as well as a watermark confirming it was created or edited using OpenAI’s generative AI tools,” the Snopes article said. “The lower-resolution image did not have an OpenAI watermark and was too blurry for telltale anomalies to be apparent.” Read the full analysis on Snopes.
Since no legitimate or even “less-credible” news sources had shared the images, Snopes added that this cast further doubt on them. Hany Farid, the co-founder of the deepfake detection company GetReal, told the website that the higher-resolution image was “clearly derived from the lower-resolution version.” As for the purported original lower-resolution shot, “while there are no obvious visual anomalies, the low quality/resolution is a bit of a red flag,” Farid said.
“In particular, given the apparent narrow depth of focus, this does not appear to photographed with a mobile device and is more likely taken with a DSLR that would afford this type of narrow depth of focus,” Farid noted, ultimately concluding: “At this point, I’d say the authenticity is inconclusive.”
Trump, who has a penchant for sharing AI slop on his Truth Social platform, has not directly addressed the images, the publication of which followed a similarly AI-generated video of Harp grinning over Trump’s shoulder, which was also deemed to be bogus.
This aticle originally appeared on HuffPost.
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