Above: I used ChatGPT AI to remove the add-ons in The Daily Beast.
Update: Just now on TV, Trump praised Karoline Leavitt: “Those lips — they move like a machine gun.” Of all the ways he could praise his press secretary, Trump chose to focus on her lips.
Update 2: Having a few hours to think about it, I think this merits a cartoon:
Update 3: There is a meaningful new rebuttal to the Karoline Leavitt AI-photo story.
The New Republic has examined the disputed photograph against the Getty Images archive and reports that the photograph in Leavitt’s farewell post appears to be the genuine Anna Moneymaker/Getty photograph—not an AI-altered version of it. Its headline is unusually unequivocal: “People are accusing Karoline Leavitt of sharing an AI-altered image in her goodbye post. But the photo appears to be real.”
Yesterday before the above story was published in The Daily Beast I made these cartoons about Karoline Leavit (click images to enlarge):
Then the The Daily Beast (subscription) published the story about the AI altered image (top of page here). It didn’t hit the mainstream even though it all but begged to be shared by other media. I found one secondary outlet, Atlanta Black Star (‘Walls Are Closing In’: Karoline Leavitt Caught Using AI In Goodbye to Trump After Abruptly Leaving White House Days After He Put Staff in Harm’s Way), already picking up the AI angle, and RatedNews was carrying the Beast story, but I didn’t see major independent follow-ups yet from outlets such as CNN, NBC, AP, NYT, WaPo, etc.
Later in the evening Business Insider picked it up:
I decided to wait until this morning to see whether the story about her AI face had legs and was worth writing about. There is a meaningful increase in social-media spread: the Daily Beast story about Karoline Leavitt has now climbed to about 5,360 upvotes on Reddit’s r/politics, up substantially from roughly 3,100 when I last checked. The Reddit discussion is also generating debate there in over 360 comments about whether the evidence establishes AI alteration specifically versus conventional digital retouching and other things.
Here’s the way the story evolved:
Leavitt posts a highly personal farewell statement about leaving the White House to devote herself to her children.
Instead of the statement being the whole story, attention turns to the photograph accompanying it.
X labels the image “Made with AI.”
The Daily Beast compares it with the original and reports apparent cosmetic changes.
RawStory picks it up and begins incorporating the AI issue into other coverage.
Business Insider picks it up, while adding the intriguing wrinkle that X later removed the AI label.
Reddit attention grows into the thousands.
Aside from my curiosity about how Vic Verbalaitis at The Daily Beast first noticed this, there are three basic unresolved questions:
What exactly was changed?
Who changed it and why?
Why did X first flag the image as “Made with AI” and then remove the flag?
I’m mainly interested in the second question. If Karoline Leavitt knew the photograph had been altered and she approved its use, what would lead someone as media-savvy and intensely scrutinized as she is to take the risk of posting it?
I think the most interesting psychological observation is not vanity by itself. Vanity is too easy and too universal. Almost everyone prefers a flattering photograph. The intriguing part is the apparent mismatch between reward and risk. If she knew, she was potentially accepting a public humiliation and mockery in exchange for looking somewhat better in one farewell photograph.
It’s possible she had an immediate desire to control how she appeared at an emotional moment, and that the manipulation did not seem like a big deal. It’s still hard to believe she thought nobody would notice, or that if somebody did notice, the media wouldn’t pile on.
If she was trying to manipulate how people saw her — not as a press secretary; being a Trump stooge is set in stone with critics of MAGA — but physically, she’s turned part of the AI story into whether she feels so insecure about her appearance — her face and figure — that she decided to have her image digitally altered and, to her mind, enhanced.
Instead of people glancing at a flattering farewell photograph and moving on, thousands are now studying her face and figure, comparing photographs and discussing what might have been altered.
In a weird and illogical way, it’s also possible that at some level of awareness she had in mind an audience of one: Trump himself. This is weird because he sees her so frequently in person. He knows how she looks. But she also knows whether he watches her press conferences — my hunch is that the image conscious and TV-savvy president always or frequently does — and is judging how well she does and how she presents herself.
Leavitt isn’t a patient in my office free-associating in an attempt to discern unconscious motivations for things she’s done to please a man — one who we might already have decided was a father figure to her. It’s only conjecture to suggest that she wanted the picture to depict her in a way that pleased “Daddy.”
Above goes with:
One of the most worrisome signs coming into Trump’s second administration was that he right off named Susie Wiles as Chief of Staff. Wiles is a lot of things, including an unrepentant and cynical supporter of the most corrupt and incompetent president in history, but she is most certainly not incompetent. Indeed, her mastery of the political dark arts is best proven by the almost non-existent turnover within this oil spill of a White House.
Click cartoons to enlarge.
This inspired me to use Chat to make this:
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.