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Telegraph
21-07-2025
- Politics
- Telegraph
Not even AI Obama can distract from Trump's Epstein crisis
For a little over two hours, Donald Trump's Truth Social timeline filled with an AI generated clip of Barack Obama being arrested in the Oval Office, plugs for a friend's book and a three-minute video of 25 improbable stunts. Nowhere in the 22-strong flurry of posts did the US president mention Jeffrey Epstein and the crisis engulfing his presidency. Instead, as Democrats seek to keep the controversy in the headlines, Mr Trump is intent on changing the subject. Hank Sheinkopf, a Democratic strategist, said it was a familiar tactic to make bad news go away. 'He's made everything else go away,' he said. 'So why shouldn't he be able to make this go away?' On his social media feed Mr Trump discussed his thoughts on the Washington's NFL team, demanding it return to its old 'Redskins', saying he would block its attempt to build a new stadium in the city if it did not. 'Our great Indian people, in massive numbers, want this to happen,' he claimed. 'Their heritage and prestige is systematically being taken away from them.' He hit out at Obama administration officials over intelligence findings that Russia meddled in the 2016 election, a controversy reheated in the throes of the Epstein crisis last week by Tulsi Gabbard, his director of national intelligence. He shared an AI generated video depicting Mr Trump and Mr Obama sitting side by side in the Oval Office before FBI agents descend on the former Democrat president, forcing him to his knees and handcuffing him. It then then cuts to a forlorn-looking Mr Obama wearing orange overalls in prison. He also posted a compilation video including clips of a bikini-wearing woman grabbing a king cobra as it slithered toward her, motorbike trick riding, surfboard stunts, and a red Lamborghini swerving beneath a lorry before emerging unscathed on the other side. Donald J. Trump Truth Social 07.20.25 06:41 PM EST — Fan Donald J. Trump Posts From Truth Social (@TrumpDailyPosts) July 20, 2025 On Thursday evening, the Wall Street Journal published details of a birthday message Mr Trump allegedly wrote Epstein many years ago in which he wrote about the pair having 'certain things in common'. The White House pushed back on any idea that the president was trying to change the subject with his flurry of social media posts. 'President Trump's Truth social posts articulate the most consequential first six months of any administration in history, confirmation of the Russiagate hoax and his transparency at all times with the American people,' Taylor Rogers, a White House spokesperson, said. A senior administration official added that the story was rumbling around Washington but had faded from view beyond. 'This is a media obsession. Voters are more interested in real things like inflation coming down and illegal immigrants being sent home,' they said. But Democrats think they have an issue they can weaponise through the midterm elections next year. 'The line from the White House is that Twitter isn't real life, but the reality of our current politics is that these social media influencers, podcasters, and pseudo operatives are frequently setting the conversation,' said Nick Ryan, a Democratic strategist. 'There's a reason smart Democrats are hammering this fissure.' It is a reminder to voters that Mr Trump is not like them, runs the thinking. 'Whose side are you on?' Ro Khanna, the California Democrat, told Politico. He is one of the figures pushing an amendment to release all the Epstein documents. 'Are you voting to protect rich and powerful men, or are you standing with America's children and the people?' The crisis began as a Maga movement push to remind Mr Trump that he had promised to release all the documents related to the Epstein investigation, amid claims that they contained the names of other powerful abusers. When his Department of Justice announced it had reviewed the files, and that it would not be releasing them, there was an outcry among some of Mr Trump's most loyal supporters. After details of the lewd birthday card Mr Trump allegedly sent to Epstein for his 50th birthday in 2003 emerged last week, the president denied sending the message and promptly sued the newspaper and its proprietor Rupert Murdoch. Since then the president has avoided taking questions from journalists. He spoke at a bill signing on Friday for more than 30 minutes about everything from the economy to his election win and his predecessor Joe Biden, taking the time to introduce more than a dozen members of Congress, without ever mentioning Epstein. 'We worked hard. It's a very important act, the genius act. They named it after me,' he said just before signing the act. 'I want to thank you. This is a hell of an act.'
New York Times
19-07-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Veronica Roth's Favorite Dystopian Novels
I don't know about you, but for me lately it often feels like reality is slowly disintegrating. I don't know if images are real or A.I.-generated; I can't always tell if the accounts interacting with mine online are humans or bots; I watch people in power obfuscate, posture and deceive … and that's just an average Wednesday in America. So it may seem like an odd time to read dystopian fiction. But while it's understandable to crave optimism or escapism in times like these, we also need someone — anyone — to say they're also seeing what we're seeing. That's what dystopian fiction offers. Each of these visions of the future is, in its own way, an acknowledgment of reality or an exploration of human nature. Some of them showcase our resilience, humor and capacity for love in a crumbling world; others show quite the opposite. Regardless, I drink from the well of dystopian fiction when I am desperate to see myself and my fellow man more clearly. Here are a few of my favorites. Hum In a world inundated with technology, a woman gets paid to undergo an experimental procedure to make her face unrecognizable to scanners. She uses the money to buy her family a weekend pass to an offline forest haven — at which point, things take a bit of a turn. Phillips expertly captures the barrage of advertisements and digital noise that has become so normalized, as well as the loneliness and disconnection that our dependence on devices can foster. Her main character's longing for kinship, silence and meaning has never felt more relatable. Read our review. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Malay Mail
15-07-2025
- Malay Mail
‘Fantasy-land Auschwitz': Outrage as AI generates fake Holocaust victims for Facebook profit
LONDON, July 15 — The Facebook post shows a photo of a pretty curly-haired girl on a tricycle and says she is Hannelore Kaufmann, 13-year-old from Berlin who died in the Auschwitz concentration camp. But there is no such Holocaust victim and the photo is not real, but generated by AI. Content creators, often based in South Asia, are churning out such posts for money, targeting Westerners' emotional reactions to the Holocaust, in which six million Jewish people died, researchers told AFP. Critics say that such AI-generated images, text and videos are offensive and contribute to Holocaust distortion by conjuring up a 'fantasy-land Auschwitz'. The Auschwitz museum sounded the alarm over the trend. 'We're dealing with the creation of a false reality — because it is falsifying images... falsifying history,' museum spokesman Pawel Sawicki told AFP. The museum at the site of Auschwitz-Birkenau Nazi concentration and extermination camp, where one million Jews were murdered in Nazi-occupied Poland, first noticed the posts in May, Sawicki said. Some reproduced the museum's posts about victims but changed the images using AI, without flagging this. 'You can see the photo is based on the original but it's completely changed', Sawicki said. A recent post about a Polish man was recreated with an 'outrageous' AI image of an Asian man, he added. In others, 'both the photo and the story are fabricated'' Sawicki said, portraying 'people who never existed'. A girl with a flower in her hair is named as Yvette Kahn who died in Auschwitz. No such victim appears in databases of the victims. In other cases, details do not match. A girl called Hanni Lore or Hannelore Kaufmann lived in western Germany — not Berlin — and died in Sobibor camp — not Auschwitz, according to Israel's Yad Vashem remembrance centre. Posts add emotive elements such as Kaufmann loving her tricycle. But the Auschwitz museum spokesman stressed: 'We generally don't have information about these people's lives.' Complaints to Facebook owner Meta have not resulted in action, Sawicki said. 'Unfortunately, it seems that from the perspective of the platform, this doesn't violate rules or regulations.' Facebook permits photo-realistic generative AI content but says it should be labelled, researchers said. Meta did not respond to AFP's request for comment. AFP currently works in 26 languages with Facebook's fact checking programme, in which Facebook pays to use fact checks from around 80 organisations globally on its platform, WhatsApp and Instagram. Complaints to Facebook owner Meta about AI-generated Holocaust photos have not resulted in action. — AFP pic 'They earn money' The Holocaust trend was fuelled by Facebook's content-monetisation feature, researchers said. 'They create these images that trigger people to like or comment and they earn money from that,' Martin Degeling, a researcher for AI Forensics non-profit, told AFP. To elicit 'emotional responses, you have to constantly switch topics' and the Holocaust seems to be the latest, Degeling said. At least a dozen Facebook pages and groups post such content, many with administrators in developing economies such as India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. In Europe or the United States, monetisation from such posts 'wouldn't be a sustainable income' but in poorer countries 'you can live off that', Degeling said. Holocaust posts often appear on pages previously run by US or British organisations. 'It's more lucrative to target high-income countries' via hacked or dormant accounts, Degeling said. One page is still named after The Two Pennies pub in North Shields, northeastern England. Clare Daley, who manages the pub's social media, told AFP its account was hacked but Meta took no action. 'It has been a huge shame, as we have years of posts and followers on there,' she said. Now managed in Sri Lanka, the page has 23,000 followers. A woman takes a selfie with her mobile phone in front of the gate with lettering 'Arbeit Macht Frei' (Work Will Set You Free) at the Memorial And Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau in Oswiecim, Poland, on January 14, 2025. — AFP pic 'Incredibly offensive' Fake portraits of Holocaust victims particularly upset victims' families. 'When I see that they post these images, it almost seems like it's mocking ... like we could just artificially recreate that loss,' said Shaina Brander, a 31-year-old working in finance in New York. Her 100-year-old grandmother, Chajka Brander, lost all her family in the Holocaust and camp guards took away her photographs. Her father was shot in front of her and 'she doesn't remember what he looks like', Brander said. 'You can't make an AI photo to bring that image back to her.' Holocaust educator Sofia Thornblad posts on TikTok about AI-generated videos simulating the Holocaust, which she calls 'incredibly offensive'. The chief curator at Tulsa's Sherwin Miller Museum of Jewish Art cited one called: 'Asked AI to show me what it was like as a prisoner of Auschwitz'. Liked over 74,000 times, it shows rosy-faced prisoners and quite comfy bunkbeds. TikTok labels this 'sensitive content' with an option to 'learn the facts about the Holocaust'. 'We have pictures of what liberation of concentration camps looks like and it's absolutely horrific,' Thornblad, 31, told AFP. The AI video looks 'almost neutral', she said. 'It's like fantasy-land Auschwitz.' For Mykola Makhortykh, who researches the impact of AI on Holocaust memory, 'we should be extremely concerned'. Chatbots are 'particularly worrisome' for historical information, the University of Bern lecturer told AFP. 'Sometimes we even have them inventing, essentially, fake historical witnesses and fake historical evidence.' They can 'hallucinate' non-existent events — such as mass drowning of Jews, he said. AI providers must use better information sources, he said but Holocaust museums also 'need to adapt'. Some already use AI to preserve survivors' memories. The UK's National Holocaust Centre and Museum interviewed 11 survivors for its 'Forever Project'. Thanks to AI, visitors can 'talk to' Steven Mendelsson, who came to Britain in the Kindertransport and died recently, museum director Marc Cave told AFP. 'It's a great use, a respectful use, of Steve,' he said. 'Our ethical guideline is: treat the tech as if it were the real person.' — AFP
Japan Times
15-07-2025
- Japan Times
Holocaust AI fakes spark alarm
The Facebook post shows a photo of a pretty curly-haired girl on a tricycle and says she is Hannelore Kaufmann, a 13-year-old from Berlin who died in the Auschwitz concentration camp. But there is no such Holocaust victim and the photo is not real, but generated by AI. Content creators, often based in South Asia, are churning out such posts for money, targeting Westerners' emotional reactions to the Holocaust, in which 6 million Jewish people died, researchers say. Critics say that such AI-generated images, text and videos are offensive and contribute to Holocaust distortion by conjuring up a "fantasy-land Auschwitz." The Auschwitz museum sounded the alarm over the trend. "We're dealing with the creation of a false reality — because it is falsifying images ... falsifying history," said museum spokesman Pawel Sawicki. The museum at the site of Auschwitz-Birkenau Nazi concentration and extermination camp, where 1 million Jews were murdered in Nazi-occupied Poland, first noticed the posts in May, Sawicki said. Some reproduced the museum's posts about victims but changed the images using AI, without flagging this. "You can see the photo is based on the original but it's completely changed," Sawicki said. A recent post about a Polish man was recreated with an "outrageous" AI image of an Asian man, he added. In others, "both the photo and the story are fabricated," Sawicki said, portraying "people who never existed." A girl with a flower in her hair is named as Yvette Kahn who died in Auschwitz. No such victim appears in databases of the victims. In other cases, details do not match. A girl called Hanni Lore or Hannelore Kaufmann lived in western Germany — not Berlin — and died in Sobibor camp — not Auschwitz, according to Israel's Yad Vashem remembrance center. Posts add emotive elements such as Kaufmann loving her tricycle. But the Auschwitz museum spokesman stressed: "We generally don't have information about these people's lives." Floral tributes and candles are kept near the "Death Wall" on the day of the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp, at Auschwitz, Germany, on Jan. 7. | Pool via REUTERS Complaints to Facebook owner Meta have not resulted in action, Sawicki said. "Unfortunately, it seems that from the perspective of the platform, this doesn't violate rules or regulations." Facebook permits photorealistic generative AI content but says it should be labeled, researchers said. Meta did not respond to a request for comment. 'They earn money' The Holocaust trend was fuelled by Facebook's content-monetization feature, researchers said. "They create these images that trigger people to like or comment and they earn money from that," said Martin Degeling, a researcher for AI Forensics non-profit. To elicit "emotional responses, you have to constantly switch topics" and the Holocaust seems to be the latest, Degeling said. At least a dozen Facebook pages and groups post such content, many with administrators in developing economies such as India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. In Europe or the United States, monetization from such posts "wouldn't be a sustainable income" but in poorer countries "you can live off that," Degeling said. Holocaust posts often appear on pages previously run by U.S. or British organizations. "It's more lucrative to target high-income countries" via hacked or dormant accounts, Degeling said. One page is still named after The Two Pennies pub in North Shields, northeastern England. Clare Daley, who manages the pub's social media, said its account was hacked but Meta took no action. "It has been a huge shame, as we have years of posts and followers on there," she said. Now managed in Sri Lanka, the page has 23,000 followers. 'Incredibly offensive' Fake portraits of Holocaust victims particularly upset victims' families. "When I see that they post these images, it almost seems like it's mocking ... like we could just artificially recreate that loss," said Shaina Brander, a 31-year-old working in finance in New York. Her 100-year-old grandmother, Chajka Brander, lost all her family in the Holocaust and camp guards took away her photographs. Her father was shot in front of her and "she doesn't remember what he looks like," Brander said. "You can't make an AI photo to bring that image back to her." Holocaust educator Sofia Thornblad posts on TikTok about AI-generated videos simulating the Holocaust, which she calls "incredibly offensive". The chief curator at Tulsa's Sherwin Miller Museum of Jewish Art cited one called: "Asked AI to show me what it was like as a prisoner of Auschwitz." Liked over 74,000 times, it shows rosy-faced prisoners and quite comfy bunkbeds. TikTok labels this "sensitive content" with an option to "learn the facts about the Holocaust." "We have pictures of what liberation of concentration camps looks like and it's absolutely horrific," said Thornblad, 31. The AI video looks "almost neutral," she said. "It's like fantasy-land Auschwitz." For Mykola Makhortykh, who researches the impact of AI on Holocaust memory, "we should be extremely concerned." Chatbots are "particularly worrisome" for historical information, said the University of Bern lecturer. "Sometimes we even have them inventing, essentially, fake historical witnesses and fake historical evidence." They can "hallucinate" non-existent events — such as mass drowning of Jews, he said. AI providers must use better information sources, he said but Holocaust museums also "need to adapt." Some already use AI to preserve survivors' memories. The U.K.'s National Holocaust Centre and Museum interviewed 11 survivors for its "Forever Project." Thanks to AI, visitors can "talk to" Steven Mendelsson, who came to Britain in the Kindertransport and died recently, said museum director Marc Cave. "It's a great use, a respectful use, of Steve," he said. "Our ethical guideline is: treat the tech as if it were the real person."
Yahoo
14-07-2025
- Yahoo
Holocaust AI fakes spark alarm
The Facebook post shows a photo of a pretty curly-haired girl on a tricycle and says she is Hannelore Kaufmann, 13-year-old from Berlin who died in the Auschwitz concentration camp. But there is no such Holocaust victim and the photo is not real, but generated by AI. Content creators, often based in South Asia, are churning out such posts for money, targeting Westerners' emotional reactions to the Holocaust, in which six million Jewish people died, researchers told AFP. Critics say that such AI-generated images, text and videos are offensive and contribute to Holocaust distortion by conjuring up a "fantasy-land Auschwitz". The Auschwitz museum sounded the alarm over the trend. "We're dealing with the creation of a false reality -- because it is falsifying images... falsifying history," museum spokesman Pawel Sawicki told AFP. The museum at the site of Auschwitz-Birkenau Nazi concentration and extermination camp, where one million Jews were murdered in Nazi-occupied Poland, first noticed the posts in May, Sawicki said. Some reproduced the museum's posts about victims but changed the images using AI, without flagging this. "You can see the photo is based on the original but it's completely changed", Sawicki said. A recent post about a Polish man was recreated with an "outrageous" AI image of an Asian man, he added. In others, "both the photo and the story are fabricated"" Sawicki said, portraying "people who never existed". A girl with a flower in her hair is named as Yvette Kahn who died in Auschwitz. No such victim appears in databases of the victims. In other cases, details do not match. A girl called Hanni Lore or Hannelore Kaufmann lived in western Germany -- not Berlin -- and died in Sobibor camp -- not Auschwitz, according to Israel's Yad Vashem remembrance centre. Posts add emotive elements such as Kaufmann loving her tricycle. But the Auschwitz museum spokesman stressed: "We generally don't have information about these people's lives." Complaints to Facebook owner Meta have not resulted in action, Sawicki said. "Unfortunately, it seems that from the perspective of the platform, this doesn't violate rules or regulations." Facebook permits photo-realistic generative AI content but says it should be labelled, researchers said. Meta did not respond to AFP's request for comment. AFP currently works in 26 languages with Facebook's fact checking programme, in which Facebook pays to use fact checks from around 80 organisations globally on its platform, WhatsApp and Instagram. - 'They earn money' - The Holocaust trend was fuelled by Facebook's content-monetisation feature, researchers said. "They create these images that trigger people to like or comment and they earn money from that," Martin Degeling, a researcher for AI Forensics non-profit, told AFP. To elicit "emotional responses, you have to constantly switch topics" and the Holocaust seems to be the latest, Degeling said. At least a dozen Facebook pages and groups post such content, many with administrators in developing economies such as India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. In Europe or the United States, monetisation from such posts "wouldn't be a sustainable income" but in poorer countries "you can live off that", Degeling said. Holocaust posts often appear on pages previously run by US or British organisations. "It's more lucrative to target high-income countries" via hacked or dormant accounts, Degeling said. One page is still named after The Two Pennies pub in North Shields, northeastern England. Clare Daley, who manages the pub's social media, told AFP its account was hacked but Meta took no action. "It has been a huge shame, as we have years of posts and followers on there," she said. Now managed in Sri Lanka, the page has 23,000 followers. - 'Incredibly offensive' - Fake portraits of Holocaust victims particularly upset victims' families. "When I see that they post these images, it almost seems like it's mocking ... like we could just artificially recreate that loss," said Shaina Brander, a 31-year-old working in finance in New York. Her 100-year-old grandmother, Chajka Brander, lost all her family in the Holocaust and camp guards took away her photographs. Her father was shot in front of her and "she doesn't remember what he looks like", Brander said. "You can't make an AI photo to bring that image back to her." Holocaust educator Sofia Thornblad posts on TikTok about AI-generated videos simulating the Holocaust, which she calls "incredibly offensive". The chief curator at Tulsa's Sherwin Miller Museum of Jewish Art cited one called: "Asked AI to show me what it was like as a prisoner of Auschwitz". Liked over 74,000 times, it shows rosy-faced prisoners and quite comfy bunkbeds. TikTok labels this "sensitive content" with an option to "learn the facts about the Holocaust". "We have pictures of what liberation of concentration camps looks like and it's absolutely horrific," Thornblad, 31, told AFP. The AI video looks "almost neutral", she said. "It's like fantasy-land Auschwitz." For Mykola Makhortykh, who researches the impact of AI on Holocaust memory, "we should be extremely concerned". Chatbots are "particularly worrisome" for historical information, the University of Bern lecturer told AFP. "Sometimes we even have them inventing, essentially, fake historical witnesses and fake historical evidence." They can "hallucinate" non-existent events -- such as mass drowning of Jews, he said. AI providers must use better information sources, he said but Holocaust museums also "need to adapt". Some already use AI to preserve survivors' memories. The UK's National Holocaust Centre and Museum interviewed 11 survivors for its "Forever Project". Thanks to AI, visitors can "talk to" Steven Mendelsson, who came to Britain in the Kindertransport and died recently, museum director Marc Cave told AFP. "It's a great use, a respectful use, of Steve," he said. "Our ethical guideline is: treat the tech as if it were the real person." am/har/gil/yad
