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Today President Biden announced his reelection bid. In response, the GOP announced its further descent into the uncanny valley, with a big assist from artificial intelligence.

Presumably designed as a rebuke of Biden’s own relatively somber campaign video, the Republican offering—titled “Beat Biden”—foretells the dystopian future heralded by the incumbent’s imagined second win. It’s an all-but-unlivable hellscape of war, financial ruin, and crime. And it’s all, according to the YouTube description, rendered by artificial intelligence tools. Axios reports that “this is the first time the RNC has produced a video that is 100% AI, according to a spokesperson.”

The video itself offers a clarification baked into a watermark in the top left corner: “Built entirely with AI imagery.”

So not 100 percent. There’s music, bits of voice-over, and a ton of post-production effects (jitters and other “camera” movements, vignetting, animation, color-grading, sound effects, light flares, and more) happening in this video. But nonetheless, the production does appear to rely only on startlingly good AI imagery—replacing what would normally be general stock “b-roll,” the footage typically licensed from vast libraries to fill videos (and ads, and even works of our own MoJo journalism). One such AI image generator, Midjourney, rolled out its new model (version 5) in March, and it is capable of producing astonishingly realistic images, with a few stubborn “tells”: Despite some serious improvements, human hands are still a bit weird; extra limbs appear where they shouldn’t; and most prominently, words are rendered unreadable gobbledegook. You’ll recall the rash of stories about the fake Trump arrest photographs.

The producers behind the GOP video have done a good job concealing the AI-ness of the images, by digitally degrading the pictures to make them look more like video. When Taipei is bombed 10 seconds in, lens effects have been added to make it look like the image has been ripped from a witness’ social media account. But mysteriously, the city’s famous Taipei 101 tower sticks up at a dangerously titled angle compared to the rest of the skyline. Is it meant to be an impossibly wide-angle lens? Unclear.

AI’s Leaning Tower of Taipei.

GOP

At 15 seconds, the AI imagines people presumably queuing to get their money out of a collapsed regional bank. Their faces are strange and potato-y. They are all white and old. The day appears to be both unusually sunny and very cold: They are bundled up, but there are simply too many people wearing sunglasses. My colleague reminds me that if you live in Denver, this is a common phenomenon. But look closer: The yellow cordon appears to pass straight through a woman’s purse.

Fox News viewers queuing up to see what Tucker does next?

At 24 seconds, another classic AI tell: The words on the shop signs don’t make any sense.

No need to get your eyes checked. AI renders words illegible.

I know I was meant to be scared when I saw the tattooed, smoking “criminal” at 26 seconds—but AI imagines this sinewing young man as very handsome and cool, despite his “MS 13” forehead ink. In my experience playing with Midjourney, this is also a common feature. It defaults to beauty norms when creating human faces.

Smooth criminal

Finally, what’s meant to be the clinching image of a distressed Biden behind the Resolute Desk contains a humorous flaw: He’s not actually leaning on the desk. Biden’s elbow is finding support, somehow, mid-air. Yet another sign of his future presidential failings?

Definitely how a human sits.

I will let others muse at length about the corroding impact of AI on elections and democracy at large. But let this summary act as a simple guide for the coming deluge. Study the images more closely: The magic tricks of video editing will obscure the most commonplace AI signatures, at least for now. And videos won’t always come with watermarks declaring themselves as robot-generated.

As for the actual content of the ad, well, Republicans have never needed generative AI to help crank out human-crafted MS-13 ads, dripping in racism.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT.

We have a considerable $390,000 gap in our online fundraising budget that we have to close by June 30. There is no wiggle room, we've already cut everything we can, and we urgently need more readers to pitch in—especially from this specific blurb you're reading right now.

We'll also be quite transparent and level-headed with you about this.

In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

You're here for reporting like that, not fundraising, but one cannot exist without the other, and it's vitally important that we hit our intimidating $390,000 number in online donations by June 30.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. It's going to be a nail-biter, and we really need to see donations from this specific ask coming in strong if we're going to get there.

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