‘Trump Gaza' AI video intended as political satire, says creator
The creator of the viral 'Trump Gaza' AI-generated video depicting the Gaza Strip as a Dubai-style paradise has said it was intended as a political satire of Trump's 'megalomaniac idea'.
The video – posted by Trump on his Truth Social account last week – depicts a family emerging from the wreckage of war-torn Gaza into a beachside resort town lined with skyscrapers. Trump is seen sipping cocktails with a topless Benjamin Netanyahu on sun loungers, while Elon Musk tears flatbread into dips.
The video first emerged in February, shortly after Trump unveiled his property development plan for Gaza, under which he said he wants to 'clean out' the population of about 2 million people to create the 'Riviera of the Middle East'.
Trump then posted the clip without any explanation on his Truth Social platform on 26 February.
Solo Avital, an LA-based film-maker, said he created the video in less than eight hours while experimenting with AI tools in early February, and that its spread had 'surprised the hell out of me'.
'We are storytellers, we're not provocateurs, we sometimes do satire pieces such as this one was supposed to be. This is the duality of the satire: it depends what context you bring to it to make the punchline or the joke. Here there was no context and it was posted without our consent or knowledge,' he added.
Avital, who is a US citizen born in Israel, and his business partner, Ariel Vromen – director of the 2012 film The Iceman, starring Michael Shannon, Winona Ryder and Chris Evans – run EyeMix, a visuals company where they produce documentaries and commercials.
Avital said he was experimenting with the Arcana AI platform, and decided to create 'satire about this megalomaniac idea about putting statues [in Gaza]' to see what the tool could do.
He had shared the video clip with friends, while his business partner posted it on his popular Instagram for a few hours, before Avital encouraged him to take it down on the grounds 'it might be a little insensitive and we don't want to take sides'.
The pair shared an early version with Mel Gibson, who Trump named as a special ambassador to Hollywood in January and who has previously collaborated with EyeMix and Arcana. Gibson told them he shared another video about the LA fires with people close to Trump, but denied sharing the Gaza video with the president, the creators said.
The first Avital knew that the video had reached a wider audience was when he awoke to thousands of messages on his phone, as friends alerted him to Trump's post.
Avital said he was surprised by some of the reactions to the video. 'If it was the skit for Saturday Night Live the whole perception of this in the media would be the opposite – look how wild this president is and his ideas, everyone would think it's a joke.'
He said the experience had reinforced for him 'how fake news spreads when every network takes what they want and shoves it down their viewers with their narratives attached'.
He hoped this experience would 'spark a public debate about rights and wrongs' of generative AI, including what the rights of creators are.
However, as a creative industries professional, he said he generally welcomed AI, saying it is 'the best thing that's happened to creativity by a long shot. Everyone who thinks it will kill creativity, we're proof to the contrary. This film wouldn't have been created without human intervention.'
Hany Farid, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who specialises in identifying deepfakes, said this was 'not the first time and won't be the last time' that AI-generated clips about news events would go viral. He noted there had been a flurry of content created around the LA wildfires, including a video of a burnt Oscars trophy.
He said Avital's experience should make people realise 'there's no such thing as 'I just shared with a friend'. You make something, assume you don't have control.'
He added the fact the video was intended as political satire but repurposed as 'very compelling, visceral' propaganda by Trump highlighted the risk of AI-generated video.
'It allows individuals without a lot of time, money and, frankly, skill you would normally need, to generate some pretty eye-popping content. That is really cool, you can't argue,' he said.
But there is a dark side to this new capability: 'This tech is being used to create child sexual abuse material, non-consensual intimate imagery, hoaxes, conspiracies, lies that are dangerous to democracies.'
Although this video is obviously computer-generated, since videos are typically not hyper-realistic, he warned: 'it's coming'. 'What happens when you get to a point where every video, audio, everything you read and see online can be fake? Where's our shared sense of reality?'
He believes AI platforms have a responsibility to 'put guardrails' on this technology, to prevent it from being misused. 'Lots are following this model of 'move fast and break things', and they're breaking things again. We could forgive this mindset at the dawn of the modern internet, nobody is looking at this thinking we need more of this, more Elon Musk, more Mark Zuckerberg.'
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