When Elon Musk shared an image showing Kamala Harris dressed as a “communist dictator” on X last week, it was clearly fake, since Harris is neither a communist nor, as far as we know, a Soviet cosplayer. And, as many observers noted, the woman in the photo, presumably generated by X's Grok tool, bore only a passing resemblance to the vice president.
“AI still can’t accurately represent Kamala Harris,” wrote one X user. “It looks like they posted a random Hispanic woman.”
“Grok just put the old Eva Longoria in a flashy outfit and he's done,” joked another, noting the resemblance between the depicted “dictator” and the Desperate housewives star.
“AI simply CAN’T replicate Kamala Harris,” posted a third. “It’s scary how the algorithm fails on an AMERICAN (of South Indian and Jamaican descent).”
Many of Harris' AI images are just as bad. Meanwhile, there's a tweet with a AI generated video Showing Harris and Donald Trump in a romantic relationship — culminating in her holding their love child, who resembles Trump — has been viewed nearly 28 million times on X. Throughout the montage, Harris morphs into what appear to be other people, while the noticeably better Trump footage remains fairly consistent.
When we tried using Grok to capture a photo of Harris and Trump putting aside their differences to read a copy of WIRED, the results repeatedly accurately depicted the former president while misrepresenting the vice president. Harris appeared with a variety of facial features, hairstyles, and skin tones. On a few occasions, she looked more like former First Lady Michelle Obama.
Grok differs from some well-known AI image generators in that it allows users to create fake photos of political figures. Earlier this year, Midjourney began blocking its users from creating images of Trump and President Joe Biden. (The ban also applies to Harris.) The move followed the publication of a report from the Center for Countering Digital Hate that concluded that the tool could be used to generate a range of politically charged images.
Similarly, OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini both failed to produce images of either Harris or Trump in WIRED’s tests. Meanwhile, a number of open-source image generators, such as Grok, will produce images of politicians. WIRED found that one such model, Stable Diffusion, also produced less-than-great images of Harris.
Modern AI image generators use so-called diffusion models to generate images from text prompts. These models are fed thousands of labeled images, typically scraped from the web or collected from other sources. Joaquin Cuenca Abela, CEO of Freepik, a company that hosts several AI tools, including several image generators, tells WIRED that the difficulty for such generators to invoke Harris compared to Trump is that they’re given fewer well-labeled images.
Despite her prominence, Harris has not been photographed as often as Trump. WIRED’s search of photo provider Getty Images confirms this; it turned up 63,295 images of Harris, compared to 561,778 of Trump. Given her relatively recent entry into the presidential race, Harris is “a new celebrity,” as far as AI image makers are concerned, says Cuenca Abela. “It always takes a few months to catch up,” he says.
