The result was an absurdity fit for the era that is shaped, still, by Trump. Trump has been arrested in #Manhattan this morning!” one post read, teetering between credulity and parody. Some posts sharing the images acknowledged their AI origins others were notably less clear. News footage.”) Higgins posted the AI’s responses on Twitter, making the just-a-joke fakery clear. (His inputs: “Donald Trump falling over while getting arrested. Speculation over the possibility of a “perp walk” grew so intense that the British journalist Eliot Higgins decided to imagine the event using the text-to-image generator Midjourney. The images were not photos, but rather the results of artificial intelligence responding to that most human of prompts: impatience. Looking more closely, I noticed the blurry unreality of the people in the images: the faces that seemed, up close, only loosely face-like the hands with not-quite fingers the extra appendages the missing ones. (Trump, that canny calibrator of public expectation, himself contributed to the fever.) Had the indictment finally come down, I wondered, and had the arrest ensued? Had Trump’s Teflon coating-so many alleged misdeeds, so few consequences-finally worn away? Pics or it didn’t happen, people say, and, well, here were the pics. When I first saw the images, I did a double take: The event they seem to depict-the arrest of Donald Trump-has been a matter of feverish anticipation this week, as a grand jury decides whether to indict the former president for hush-money payments allegedly made on his behalf to the adult-film star Stormy Daniels. Finally, he falls, that familiar sweep of hair the only thing rigid against the swirl of bodies that surround him. The former president is fighting with the police.
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