The conspiracy theorists who think Biden has been replaced by AI

At 1:18 pm ET on July 21, 2023, President Joe Biden stepped to the podium in the White House's Roosevelt Room and announced, "I'm the AI." The official transcript of the event says that this remark was followed by "laughter," but it's no joke to the increasing number of conspiracy theorists who claim that the real Joe Biden has been somehow replaced by artificial intelligence. For instance, in a new story published today, The New York Times looked at conspiracy theorists who questioned whether (or even claimed that) Biden had died. Of course, if he was dead, the cabal of elites running the Biden administration, in true Weekend at Bernie's fashion, certainly couldn't admit that he was dead. Fortunately, they could use AI to make it look like Biden was still alive! That sort of thinking led to one influencer's "just asking 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 dissappears [sic] for a few seconds now that we know the software they have been using in Azure has been compromised?” Crazy, right? But it's not a new idea. As quickly as deepfake video clips, AI-generated audio, and 3D holographic projection have gone mainstream, conspiracy theorists have rolled the new tech right into the old claims about "body doubles" and so forth. Thanks to the high quality of these technical developments, any audio or video appearance can now be claimed to be fake—and some people will believe it. Take the eight-hour (!) Facebook video posted in 2021 with the title "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 to a helicopter waiting on the White House lawn was faked:

Focusing on a clip of the president in which the top of his head seems to disappear against the sky, the host says, "This is not Joe Biden making an appearance." "What you’re actually seeing here is a holographic image of Joe Biden being transmitted from behind the scenes," he says.

It didn't matter to the theory that this event had been held with actual journalists in attendance and that pictures of Biden had been taken from numerous angles. As Steve Herman, a Voice of America reporter, noted on social media, "I was the one holding the lighter-colored fuzzy microphone and thus literally in front of @POTUS on the South Lawn. It's all real. Who actually believes this 'faked moon landing' type nonsense and more importantly who is spreading it?" Regardless of how many people truly believe these sorts of claims, debunking them takes time. Numerous reporters at the event took to social media to rebut conspiracy theories, while PolitiFact, the BBC, and Agence France Press ran fact-check stories that took time to report, write, and edit. In the meantime, conspiracy theorists just moved on to other claims. In 2022, the BBC ran a report on how these false claims sometimes go viral. One 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 the right-wing US television channels Newsmax and One America News." As one social media user put it: "My eye can detect the uncanny valley instantly. This is 100% deepfake technology. They pasted Biden's face on an actor. I'd bet my career on it." The idea was apparently that Biden was so old, sick, or incapacitated that he couldn't do these events in person. To keep up the illusion of health and vitality, computers were allegedly deployed. These kinds of conspiracies have grown more common this year, especially after Biden's widely criticized debate performance against Donald Trump. As calls grew for Biden to remove himself from the race, he did an interview with the TV show Morning Joe. A TikTok user quickly claimed that this was not Biden at all, and many of the 2,000 (!!) commenters on the video agreed. The Daily Dot rounded up some reactions:

“He never speaks that fast,” one top comment read. “Definitely AI.” “This is clearly AI,” another said. “Wild.” Among the nearly 2,000 comments left on the video, the vast majority appeared to reference machine learning technology. “AI doesn’t have us fooled yet,” a commenter added. “Bro that’s AI… you can’t convince me otherwise,” a separate user said.

A few weeks later, after dropping out of the race, Biden was still recovering from COVID-19 and called in by phone to a campaign event with Vice President Kamala Harris. Cue the skeptics! A video quickly appeared on X (formerly Twitter), saying that the call audio was all fake; it had allegedly been generated by the voice-cloning tools offered by ElevenLabs. The video received more than 8 million views. (Deutsche Welle ran a fact-check on the ElevenLabs claim. It was false.) A few days later, when Biden was out of his COVID-19 isolation period and made a very much alive address to the nation, conspiracy theorists claimed this, too, was clearly a product of AI—because Biden's skin looked too orange.

Deep doubt

Perhaps the reason "It must be AI!!!" has some believability, no matter the situation, is that AI, deepfakes, green screens, holograms, and other assorted digital tools really have gotten that good and really are used to deceive people. We've seen it in the Russia/Ukraine war, where deepfakes of both sides' leaders have been used to put words in their mouths. And the tech has gotten simple enough to use that we've even seen the average person use it to settle grudges at the local high school level or share deepfake nudes of classmates. Disinformation theorists and researchers have worried for years about the effect powerful generative AI tools will have on the world, especially when wielded by bot armies with nation-state resources behind them. Who can trust any text or audio or video again? But as all the wild—and completely fake—Biden claims show, "AI did it" can itself be a new disinformation claim. When the fakes get good enough, one can claim “it's AI” about anything and be believed. While we do need to combat deceptive "deepfake" imagery, perhaps we also need to worry about the "deep doubt" that generative AI has already sown. Welcome to the future.