Are You Ready for the Trump A.I. Nightmare?
If Trump becomes president again, your future is bleak
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Can you imagine Donald Trump presiding over the AI revolution? How does that make you feel? Full of joy? Or, like me, anxious about the dystopian nightmare?
The idea of Trump occupying the Oval Office during what could be history’s most defining technological moment in communications, one that will dwarf the Gutenberg Press in importance, leaves me nearly comatose.
To walk you through this nightmare, I’m going to present a few fictional scenarios that most likely underestimate the horrors of the growing AI presence under America’s most prolific liar. It will be a world where deep fakes are the norm. It will be a world where nobody will have a clue about the truth behind anything.
It will be checkmate.
CNN is Deleted
The first step is the deletion of CNN from your list of news channels (yes, I know more than a few of you will say, “Yay!”). The Trump administration, after Trump wins a series of personal defamation cases, oversees the seizure of CNN’s assets after bankruptcy. Most of the assets are scooped up by the Trump Family of Companies, a newly created media conglomerate.
This is not a prerequisite, though. The next events can occur without dismantling CNN:
TFN launches the Trump Real News Network(TRN), staffing it with media celebrities and anchors from One America News, Alex Jones’s Infowars, and other far-right propaganda farms.
MSNBC veers to the right as Trump appoints hundreds of new federal district court judges. The Republican-controlled Senate rubber stamps each of them with alacrity.
The Trump administration invests heavily in AI, leveraging Meta’s open-source AI tools to create an agile communications network that feeds TRN with deep fakes and other AI-generated stories and video reports.
Whistleblowers come forward in an attempt to alert the public, but they are shouted down or arrested. Attempts to establish oversight over the administration’s use of AI are repeatedly thwarted by Trump-friendly courts.
It doesn’t take long for the majority of American voters to consider TRN the main source of truth regarding news services.
TRN begins its foray into AI by running dozens of false stories per day. At first, they are small-scale events, such as a story created by generative AI about an LGBTQ+ rally at an elementary school in Texas.
Alarmed Texans protest in front of befuddled school administrators, but the substance of the story encounters no resistance.
Stories that challenge climate science appear. Ukraine’s president Zelensky is shown at a pro-Nazi event in Ukraine just as the Russians are finally about to settle for a peace treaty. Drag queens are bribing teenagers to transition. Nobody questions these stories. And none of them are true.
Then, a heroic gunslinger prevents a mass shooting event.
The Gunslinger
In its first test of a big event lie, TRN interrupts its daily propaganda with breaking news that a man armed with an AR-15 has heroically saved hundreds of festivalgoers from a mass shooting event.
The festival is real: Chicago’s delectable Taste of Chicago. The year is 2027. The Supreme Court has thrown out all Illinois and Chicago gun laws and has forced Chicago into becoming an open-carry city like the rest of the country.
The man with the gun is not real. He’s part of a generative AI video created by a secretive company called Trump Video Enhancements LLC, a subsidiary of the above-named Trump Family of Companies.
There is nobody in the crowd who might dispute the existence of the gunslinger. Festival attendees are busy shoving Italian beef into their mouths and watching music at the soundstages. They’ll all go home and say, “Oh, wow, I missed that!”
So when TRN’s properly manicured blonde anchor breaks in with the following breaking news, the world takes her report at face value:
Breaking news now out of Chicago. TRN has obtained exclusive video of an American patriot preventing a mass shooting at the Taste of Chicago. The video shows only the shooter, not the perp, who police say was killed in an act of remarkable heroism before he could open fire on a crowd of festivalgoers.
Karen Felicia Jones has more on this story. Karen?
Sales of AR-15s skyrocket as Americans are urged to arm themselves. You would think that an administration like this would not want its populace armed to the teeth, but they’re so confident of their propaganda machine that they aren’t worried about it.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in China
Excited by their success, TNR tries a bolder experiment. When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez visits Japan for discussions over climate change, TNR broadcasts a deep fake showing her paying a visit to China’s President Xi.
Ocasio-Cortez doesn’t help her cause much when she responds to the deep fake by saying, “I’ve never met the man, but I’m sure he’d be a better and smarter leader than the psychopath currently in the Oval Office. Maybe I should stop by for some tea.”
Three months later, she’s arrested for espionage.
Riots in Chicago
TRN’s confidence now at its peak, the network deep fakes a riot in the streets of Chicago.
Local authorities denying that there is any disturbance try to broadcast their objections on Twitter, but Elon Musk suspends their accounts with this statement:
“I’m getting it from good authority that these riots are happening! Not sure the denials. Maybe too much poo in that Chicago meat sauce! #firebrandon”
When Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson tweets that there are no reports of a civil disturbance, Twitter slaps a false news alert on his tweet, then suspends his account, too.
The Trump administration sends National Guard units into Chicago, sweeping predominantly Black neighborhoods and making hundreds of arrests.
You might think, “Well, wouldn’t Illinois Democratic Governor J.B. Pritzker have something to say about this?”
Unfortunately, he has his own problems:
The Department of Justice (DOJ), under Attorney General Sidney Powell, has been busy with its own iteration of the administration’s AI. It has incorporated it into its legal software, creating hundreds of fake documents that make it appear that Pritzker Group Private Capital, a company run by Pritzker before he became governor, has been engaged in so much sleaze that it makes Trump’s various companies look like a girl scout troop.
Pritzker’s approval rating in Illinois drops to 20% before he is finally indicted.
If you think this stuff isn’t possible, it’s already happening. If you don’t believe me, check out the court reporter’s notes for the Fox/Dominion defamation trial.
Elon Musk has turned Twitter into a propaganda arm for the nationalist right. He is, quite literally, making shit up as he goes.
Fox News is another propaganda outlet for nationalists. Several other smaller networks, angered by Fox News’ too-slow growth into white nationalism, have sprouted up to compete against it.
Talk radio is a shitshow of masturbating wild men freaking out about everything from gay rights and drag queens to Black history. There are hundreds of podcasts hosted by boys in men’s bodies like Andrew Tate who are converting twelve-year-old kids into the next generation of misogynist incels unable to function normally in society.
Now, add AI to this toxic stew.
Pour the orange sauce of hate over the finished concoction, and you’ve got absolute carnage.
Notes and Image Credits
All screenshots
Sun Icon: Fabián Alexis, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
Storm Icon: Google, Apache License 2.0 <http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
First Rioting screenshot
Riot Scene core image: Irfan Brkovic, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
Screenshot/Photo smashup by author: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
Gunslinger Screenshot
Image of gunslinger: simonov, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
Crowd pic generated by Adobe Photoshop AI background generator (yes, I succumbed, but mostly because I just wanted to try it. Honestly, I could have easily come up with a better festival shot on my own, but I was curious about how well the tool works).
Screenshot/Photo smashup by author:
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez screenshot
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: mnrkbeta, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
Chinese President Xi: United States Department of State, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Background of China’s 18th National Congress of the Communist Party image by Dong Fang, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Screenshot/Photo smashup by author: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
Second Rioting Screenshot
Image of burning street: Licensed from Adobe Stock
Screenshot/Photo smashup by author: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
Pritzker screenshot
Image of Governor Pritzker: World Economic Forum, CC BY 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
Screenshot/Photo smashup by author: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
So… that’s freaking scary.. The tagline was bad enough, but it just kept getting worse… we have GOT to throw these MAGAt cultists into the dustbin of history. Call it a “learning experience” and make them eat our dust as we move forward.