Higgins, who was also behind a set of images of Putin being arrested, put on trial and then imprisoned, said that he posted the images with no ill intent.
He even stated clearly in his Twitter thread that the images were AI-generated.
Still, the images were enough to get him locked out of the Midjourney server, according to Higgins.
The San Francisco-based independent research lab did not respond to emails seeking comment.
“The Trump arrest image was really just casually showing both how good and bad Midjourney was at rendering real scenes,” Higgins wrote in an email.
“The images started to form a sort of narrative as I plugged in prompts to Midjourney, so I strung them along into a narrative, and decided to finish off the story.”
He pointed out that the images are far from perfect: In some, Trump is seen, oddly, wearing a police utility belt. In others, faces and hands are clearly distorted.
But it is not enough that users like Higgins clearly state in their posts that the images are AI-generated and solely for entertainment, says Shirin Anlen, media technologist at Witness, a New York-based human rights organisation that focuses on visual evidence.
Too often, the visuals are quickly reshared by others without that crucial context, she said.
Indeed, an Instagram post sharing some of Higgins’ images of Trump as if they were genuine garnered more than 79,000 likes.
“You’re just seeing an image, and once you see something, you cannot unsee it,” Anlen said.
In another recent example, social media users shared a synthetic image supposedly capturing Putin kneeling and kissing the hand of Chinese leader Xi Jinping.
The image, which circulated as the Russian president welcomed Xi to the Kremlin this week, quickly became a crude meme.
It is not clear who created the image or what tool they used, but some clues gave the forgery away.
The heads and shoes of the two leaders were slightly distorted, for example, and the room’s interior did not match the room where the actual meeting took place.
For all the latest world News Click Here
