Did you watch the arrest of Donald J. Trump? Those pictures! An army of New York police officers attacked him and handcuffed him so brutally that the former president nearly fell. Later, the press managed to go to jail. Trump was in his orange uniform, playing basketball with his new friends—unforgettable.

“This is indistinguishable from the real thing, right?” my photographer Hillary said last week when the photos were posted to Twitter. Together we traveled through Silicon Valley, the capital of the American tech world. Then photos around the world. Trump, of course, was not caught: the photos were taken with the help of artificial intelligence.

in Hillary App groups only talk to photojournalists about the dangers of this new technology. Photographers are interested and not only because they make a living with pictures. After all, they know better than anyone the danger that packaged images create their own realities in a polarized society.

Americans throw so much conspiracies at them all day — on TV, in the supermarket, on social media — that it becomes increasingly difficult to tell the real from the fake. Artificial intelligence is now giving wings to this problem. More and more people are sharing their concerns about this.

“You just see an image,” Shirin Anlin, who works for a non-governmental organization dealing with images and human rights, told PBS News. People don’t see much differently in news photos of a fake arrest than they do in real news photos. “Once you see something, you can’t erase it.” The pictures remain.

Experts warn that these images herald a new era in the spread of misinformation. The technology is so advanced that the images appear to have been distributed by news agencies. Only if you look closely will you see that Trump has three legs in one of his arrest photos.

hot Trump’s photos were taken by Elliott Higgins, founder of the investigative journalism group Bellingcat. He did so after Trump announced he would be arrested. “It wasn’t my intention to give intelligent criticism or anything like that,” he told Buzzfeed last week. Higgins explained in a Twitter thread that the 50 photos were fake. Some of the pictures look like the real thing, others – three legs! – just unrealistic and fun.

But, as indicated, it has been shared by many others without explanation or interpretation. Such a post on Instagram received 79 thousand likes.

“The United States has the best information technology in the world,” Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari wrote with two colleagues. New York timesAnd yet Americans cannot agree on who will emerge victorious in the elections. If we do not deal with the dangers of artificial intelligence, the software will be abused by people who are hungry for power and money. “If we wait for chaos, it will be too late to fix it.” He and his co-authors suggest that all world leaders start addressing the stakes — to master AI, before AI becomes our master.

“Do you think Biden is real?” In countless conversations with Americans, I’ve noticed how powerful conspiracy thinking can be. zHe. She Just in a good conversation with a Democrat or Republican about something as important as inflation, I suddenly get a question like this: Do you really think the president is there? I think it’s a copy of someone who died. What should you answer next? Especially if that person quickly fishes out AI-captured news photos from a phone with two Joe Bidens: one alive, one dead.