RNC’s AI Generated Response To Biden Is Pure Orwellian Paranoia

“Two different worlds, we live in two different worlds.” —  Jerry Vale

If you were in a spaceship passing this planet yesterday and just happened to be monitoring mainstream news reports, you would have seen two interesting clips: One, Joe Biden’s optimistic, inclusive invitation to America to join him in supporting a second term of his administration and two, the RNC’s purely AI generated response, which featured fake news reports of dystopian events that never happened.

Whut? Yes, that was indeed the response people had as their jaws dropped open. The ad starts out with images of street violence — which happened under Trump, by the by — and then escalated to the invasion of Taiwan and an aerial shot of the southern border being overrun by a hoard of people that would have handily kicked Attila the Hun’s butt, let alone the Border Patrol.

None of this is real, nor, obviously, were the fake news reports that intoned over the footage. The message of the piece appeared to be, “The horrible things happening under Trump might also happen under Biden, so go ahead and vote for Trump,” according to MSNBC’s Steve Benen. If this isn’t Double Speak and Double Think, I don’t know what is.

If you missed this masterpiece, take a look.

What’s so weird about this is that it’s an ad that appears to be targeting a candidate who isn’t already in office. In 2020, this anti-Biden spot might’ve made sense. In 2024, it’s just bizarre: The RNC is supposed to be able to criticize the incumbent’s record, but instead, Republicans are asking voters to imagine a hypothetical dystopia about a president who clearly hasn’t produced the results we’re supposed to worry about.

Or put another way, Biden’s actual record wasn’t scary, so the RNC found it necessary to peddle literally fake, made-up images referring to events that have not occurred.

As Matt Yglesias put it, “I feel like if you have to use fake images of hypothetical future bad things that might happen if the incumbent president stays in office, that itself tells you something.”

The RNC, in other words, accidentally stumbled onto an important point: As Biden eyes a second term, his opposition party struggled to find anything wrong with his actual record while in office.

Now let that sink into your grey matter a bit. The RNC has no case against Biden, so it’s using technology to create scary images that feel real and that invoke fear and trepidation. We have left facts behind and now we’re dealing strictly with emotion and propaganda. This is how the RNC began its 2024 defense against Joe Biden, we can only assume that this is how they intend to proceed as the election continues. Heaven help us if this is a snapshot of what is to come in the next 18 months, but that is what’s taking place right now. Axios:

Why it matters: AI-generated images are disrupting art, journalism, and now politics. The 2024 election is poised to be the first election with ads full of images generated by modern Artificial Intelligence software that are meant to look and feel real to voters.

• This is the first time the RNC has produced a video that is 100% AI, according to a spokesperson.

Zoom out: A variety of new AI systems such as Midjourney and OpenAI’s Dall-E 2 are making it increasingly easy to create digital art and images that are difficult to discern from human-created art and real photographs.

Zoom in: The RNC and other political groups appear likely to use this technology throughout the campaign.

• RNC chairwoman Ronna McDaniel said in a statement accompanying the video that “Biden is so out-of-touch that after creating crisis after crisis, he thinks he deserves another four years.”

I love the irony here. Biden has created “crisis after crisis” but the RNC can’t name any of those crises off the top of their heads, moreover there’s no footage of any of these crises, so their fallback is AI generated invasionary forces with made up MS-13 characters.

And get used to it. You’re going to see more and more of it. More commentary on the Orwellian nature of this piece from the Bulwark:

The video is strange not just because of the simultaneously eerie and goofy AI-generated images, but also because of the premise—the idea that another four years of Biden could potentially result in apocalyptic problems. It’s certainly a far cry from a more typical political message challenging an incumbent: Bad stuff has happened because of this administration, but our candidate will put a stop to it.

It sure seems as though the GOP strategists who came up with this idea accept that things are mostly fine today—they’d hit Biden more directly for his record otherwise—so they think their best bet is to convince voters that if Biden is allowed to carry forward his agenda into a second term, unprecedented disasters will befall the country. Essentially: Things are good. Now imagine them getting way, way worse! It could happen! This doesn’t strike me as very well thought out messaging, but I suppose we’ll have to see how it lands with voters.

The messaging is pathetic and desperate — not to mention bereft of any intellect or substance —  because that’s the state of the current Republican party. The problem with that is that desperate people do desperate, and frequently stupid, things. Maybe Kevin McCarthy will try and upend the global economy by allowing the government to go into default in order to blame it on Biden and wreak such havoc that he can topple Biden. Not saying he will, just saying that when desperation walks through the door, common sense climbs out the window and runs and if this RNC “attack ad” is any indication, that transaction has already taken place.