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At 1:18 pm ET on July 21, 2023, President Joe Biden stepped to the podium in the White House’s Roosevelt Room and announced, “I’m the AI.” The official transcript of the event says that this remark was followed by “laughter,” but it’s no joke to the increasing number of conspiracy theorists who claim that the real Joe Biden has been somehow replaced by artificial intelligence.
For instance, in a new story published today, The New York Times looked at conspiracy theorists who questioned whether (or even claimed that) Biden had died. Of course, if he was dead, the cabal of elites running the Biden administration, in true Weekend at Bernie’s fashion, certainly couldn’t admit that he was dead. Fortunately, they could use AI to make it look like Biden was still alive!
That sort of thinking led to one influencer’s “just asking questions” post on July 24, 2024, which was viewed 78,000 times: “What If [sic] during this supposed live broadcast to the nation the holographic AI glitches and Joe Biden dissappears [sic] for a few seconds now that we know the software they have been using in Azure has been compromised?”
Crazy, right? But it’s not a new idea. As quickly as deepfake video clips, AI-generated audio, and 3D holographic projection have gone mainstream, conspiracy theorists have rolled the new tech right into the old claims about “body doubles” and so forth. Thanks to the high quality of these technical developments, any audio or video appearance can now be claimed to be fake—and some people will believe it.
Take the eight-hour (!) Facebook video posted in 2021 with the title “Biden is computer generated.” PolitiFact actually went to the trouble of watching and then fact-checking this video (spoiler: Biden is not, in fact, computer-generated), which claims that footage of Biden walking to a helicopter waiting on the White House lawn was faked:
Focusing on a clip of the president in which the top of his head seems to disappear against the sky, the host says, “This is not Joe Biden making an appearance.”
“What you’re actually seeing here is a holographic image of Joe Biden being transmitted from behind the scenes,” he says.
It didn’t matter to the theory that this event had been held with actual journalists in attendance and that pictures of Biden had been taken from numerous angles. As Steve Herman, a Voice of America reporter, noted on social media, “I was the one holding the lighter-colored fuzzy microphone and thus literally in front of @POTUS on the South Lawn. It’s all real. Who actually believes this ‘faked moon landing’ type nonsense and more importantly who is spreading it?”
Regardless of how many people truly believe these sorts of claims, debunking them takes time. Numerous reporters at the event took to social media to rebut conspiracy theories, while PolitiFact, the BBC, and Agence France Press ran fact-check stories that took time to report, write, and edit. In the meantime, conspiracy theorists just moved on to other claims.
In 2022, the BBC ran a report on how these false claims sometimes go viral. One allegedly fake, 17-second clip of Biden speaking about the January 6 attack on the US Capitol was plucked from obscurity and shared “thousands of times, including by prominent pundits from the right-wing US television channels Newsmax and One America News.” As one social media user put it: “My eye can detect the uncanny valley instantly. This is 100% deepfake technology. They pasted Biden’s face on an actor. I’d bet my career on it.”