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On July 21, 2023, at 1:18 p.m. ET, President Joe Biden took the stage in the Roosevelt Room of the White House and announced, “I am the AI.” According to the official transcript of the event, the remark was followed by “laughter,” but it’s no joke to the growing number of conspiracy theorists who claim that the real Joe Biden has somehow been replaced by artificial intelligence.
For example, in a new story published today, The New York Times looked at conspiracy theorists who questioned whether (or even claimed) Biden was dead. Of course, if he were dead, the cabal of elites running Biden's administration would actually be dead. Weekend at Bernie's fashion, certainly could not to give in that he was dead. Luckily they were able to use AI to make it look like Biden was still alive!
That kind of thinking led to an influencer's “just ask 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 disappears [sic] “Now that we're a few seconds in, we know that the software they used in Azure has been compromised?”
Crazy, right? But it’s not a new idea. As soon as deepfake videos, AI-generated audio, and 3D holographic projection went mainstream, conspiracy theorists immediately incorporated the new technology into the old claims of “body doubles” and the like. Thanks to the high quality of these technical advances, any audio or video performance can now be claimed to be fake, and some people will believe it.
Take the eight-hour (!) Facebook video posted in 2021 titled “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 toward a helicopter waiting on the White House lawn is faked:
The host focuses on a clip of the president in which the top of his head appears to disappear against the sky and says, “This is not Joe Biden showing up.”
“What you're actually seeing here is a holographic image of Joe Biden being broadcast from behind the scenes,” he says.
It didn't matter to the theory that this event was held with real journalists present and that photos of Biden were taken from multiple angles. As Steve Herman, a reporter for Voice of America, noticed on social media“I was the one holding the light colored, fuzzy microphone and literally standing in front of @POTUS on the South Lawn. This is all real. Who really believes this 'fake moon landing' nonsense and more importantly, who is spreading it?”
Regardless of how many people actually believe these claims, debunking them takes time. Numerous reporters at the event took to social media to refute conspiracy theories, while PolitiFact, the BBC, and Agence France Press published fact-checking stories that took time to report, write, and edit. In the meantime, conspiracy theorists continued to make other claims.
In 2022, the BBC published a report on how these false claims sometimes go viral. An 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 right-wing US television channels Newsmax and One America News.” As one social media user put it: “My eye can detect the uncanny valley immediately. This is 100% deepfake technology. They put Biden's face on an actor. I would bet my career on it.”
