Have you seen photos of Donald Trump with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.? They’ve been going viral on social media recently, including on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. But they’re completely fake.
“The king with MLK,” social media user Dom Lucre tweeted on Sunday.
But the image was created using artificial intelligence software and isn’t real. There’s no evidence Trump ever met the civil rights leader, who was assassinated in 1968. Trump was just 21 years old at the time King was killed.
If the name Dom Lucre rings a bell, that could be because the X account became the focus of international concern when it shared child sex abuse material to the social media site that was reportedly seen by millions of people before being taken down. X owner Elon Musk reportedly intervened to reinstate the account after it was banned, setting off a chain of events where regulators from around the world demanded answers about how X operates.
Australian politicians even held hearings where the Nick Pickles, the head of global government affairs at X, was asked about the incident. Pickles said the account may have been sharing the content “out of outrage,” an answer that perplexed regulators there.
This isn’t he first time that fake photos of Trump have spread online, even ones of the former president with historical figures. Back in July, at least two fake photos of Trump with MLK were spreading on X thanks to right-wing influencers.
Thanks to the image’s watermark, it appears the fake photo was created by Trump_History45, an X account that creates fake alternate history involving the former president.
It’s not immediately clear what program may have been used to create this particular image of Trump with King, but popular AI-creation tolls include DALL-E, Stability Diffusion and Midjourney, which all allow people to create photo-realistic images using nothing but simple text prompts.
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