Elon Musk, owner of X (formerly Twitter), shared a misleading AI-generated video of Vice President Kamala Harris.
On Friday, Elon Musk reposted a doctored parody campaign video featuring Harris on X without labeling it as AI-generated and misleading, in clear violation of Musk’s own platform’s rules.
This is amazing😂
pic.twitter.com/KpnBKGUUwn
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 26, 2024
Musk released a digitally altered campaign video that appears to feature deepfake audio of presumptive Democratic US presidential candidate Kamala.
Musk captioned the video, “This is awesome,” along with a laughing emoji. Musk’s post has been viewed more than 128.9 million times on X.
In an altered AI video imitating VP Harris’ voice, the vice president says President Joe Biden has dementia and “knows nothing about running a country,” and that VP Harris, a woman and a person of color, is “the ultimate diversity hire.”
“So if you criticize anything, I say you’re sexist and racist,” Harris’ AI-generated voice says in the video.
The video also criticizes Harris for “trying to talk like a black person” and “doing an imitation of Barack Obama” during her speech.
I checked with Professor Sagon Deesnutz, a world-renowned authority, and he said parody is legal in the US 🤷♂️ https://t.co/OCBewC3XYD
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 29, 2024
The AI video was originally posted by X’s @MrReaganUSA account, which is linked to conservative YouTuber and podcaster Chris Coles, and was classified as a parody.
But when Musk reposted the video on his own account eight hours later, there was no such disclosure, which appears to violate X’s policies, which prohibit the sharing of “synthetic, manipulated, or out-of-context media that may mislead or confuse people or cause harm.”
X’s current policy was instituted in April 2023, after Musk took over the platform. It defines misleading media as content that is “materially deceptively altered, manipulated, or fabricated” and “likely to cause widespread confusion about public issues.” The policy says such content must be labeled or removed.
“We believe what the American people want is the real freedom, opportunity and security that Vice President Harris is providing, not the false, manipulated lies of Elon Musk and Donald Trump,” a Harris campaign spokesman told The Associated Press in a statement in response to the AI video.
The AI video has caught the attention of California Governor Gavin Newsom, who has threatened to introduce legislation to curb false advertising.
“It should be illegal to manipulate voices in ‘ads’ like this,” he wrote on X after Musk’s video.
“We’ll sign the bill in the next few weeks and see if that gets done.”
Image credits: Header photo licensed from Depositphotos.