Musk & Trump AI motivational slopaganda got 700 million TikTok views

🤥 Faked Up #36: Deepfake Trump and Musk motivational clips reach millions on TikTok; Gemini helped me create a pump and dump campaign; and the BBC finds serious problems with AI chatbot summaries of its articles.

Yesterday, U.S. Senator and Ranking Member of the Senate Judiciary Committee Dick Durbin cited my findings on AI nudifiers in a letter to Mark Zuckerberg.

Durbin writes: "I am gravely concerned with Meta’s failure to prevent this perverse abuse of its platforms and I refuse to accept Meta’s facilitation of these crimes."

I am able to spend one day a week writing about Meta's moderation failures – which continue to this day – thanks to subscriber support. On that note, I am so grateful to Tomas, John, and Jeffrey for becoming paid subscribers last week.

This newsletter is a ~6 minute read and includes 52 links.

HEADLINES

Google's Super Bowl ad was not gouda enough. Italian media fell for an AI-generated image of Musk, Netanyahu, and Trump. A German court ordered X to share data about disinformation. FBI director nominee Kash Patel falsely claimed to have rejected QAnon. Meta's Joel Kaplan said fact-checking will be replaced by community notes worldwide. Elon Musk amplified a false claim that a school shooting in Sweden was being ignored. The House of Lords forced Britain's government to toughen penalties in a deepfake porn bill. ByteDance's OmniHuman-1 appears to be very good at turning a single image into synthetic video. Deepfake audio of Italy's defense minister reportedly convinced billionaire Massimo Moratti to wire 1 million euros. Emmanuel Macron posted a montage of deepfakes representing him that some experts did not find clever. Misinformation about HMPV is spreading in Southeast Asia.

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Deepfake Trump and Musk motivational clips reach hundreds of millions on TikTok

"No friends, no problem. No girlfriend, no boyfriend, no problem. No cash, big problem." That simple message propelled an AI-generated video of Donald Trump to 46 million views on TikTok.

In a different video with 15.9 million views, an AI-dubbed Elon Musk shares even more dubious advice: "My brother, you can never satisfy a woman. If you give her time, she'll be looking for money. If you give her money, she'll be looking for time."

That video was deleted after 404 Media – with whom I shared my findings early because they're an awesome publication – reached out to TikTok for comment. So please enjoy this video of Musk discussing seven types of "dangrous" women instead (a mere 5.5 million views):

Welcome to the motivational slopaganda of TikTok.

Over the past four months, short clips of the American co-presidents have flooded the video-sharing app. I found more than 60 accounts primarily dedicated to posting this type of content.

Combined, just 461 of these videos* were watched 706,592,689 times. That's 70% of the way to 1 billion views. Not too shabby for a big bucket of AI slop.

The videos predominantly share dubious self-help advice on money and relationships. But some clips highlight Tesla's plans for interplanetary domination, conspiracy theories about pyramids, or promise financial blessings.

The primary purpose of posting these videos appears to be catering to the whims of the TikTok algorithm to grow follower counts.

A few of the profiles in my sample are explicitly using the videos to sell stuff, including "F**k Around and Find Out" shirts, health supplements, AI-generated Elon Musk books, and Trump memorabilia. Others are weird impersonation ploys, possibly to be used for 1-to-1 scams like the one that recently cost a Brazilian woman $26,000.

Some accounts do appear to be run for partisan purposes. Politics shows up, infrequently, in clips that repurpose statements Trump made during his first presidency or campaign promises. There's also a few strange accounts dedicated to Elon Musk's (alleged) views on the United Kingdom's competitiveness.

It's not unusual for celebrities to be the target of crappy AI videos. I found similar motivational clips of Denzel Washington and Dwayne Johnson. But they don't collectively do the numbers I've seen the Musk/Trump videos get.

It's hard to tell from comments how many people realize that the videos aren't real; several do carry a label denoting them as AI-generated. The messages in the videos themselves range from the innocuous to the mildly misogynistic.

The main problem, as I see it, is that AI gunk is flooding our information ecosystem at a scale that should make us pause.

But I don't think it will.

Instead, low-quality and energy-intensive AI slop will keep flooding our shared spaces and further dilute the avenues for meaningful conversation. What impact this ambient noise designed to feed the algorithm has on perceptions of Donald Trump and Elon Musk will remain to be seen.