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During a 41 year career as a journalist, for our Editor Phil Parry spotting trends has always been paramount, and now this is put centre stage by the extraordinary response online to the fake AI video of Donald Trump and Binyamin Netanyahu sitting on sun loungers.
It used to be that if you had a photograph of someone with a dodgy character you had evidence of their association.
Now, though, you cannot be sure that photograph is the real thing, because it could just be part of a modern day trend in fake pictures and AI generated videos.
There has been an explosive growth in these, and they have distorted political discourse.
Take for example the fake AI generated shot of Donald Trump and Binyamin Netanyahu apparently toasting their Gaza deal, which was shared by Mr Trump.
The response to it (also online) has been extraordinary both from the left and the right, which only serves to underline how this method of communicating is a red hot button.
Within 48 hours Palestinian activists had hit back with a professional-looking AI video of their own, “Gaza is Ours”, showing Mr Trump sobbing in prison as Gazans celebrated, backed by an AI-made rock song.
But mainstream politicians too (real ones) have also been quick to use new technology in spreading their message.
In a crawling video released online last week, Mr Netanyahu grovelled to Mr Trump, declaring: “I want to thank President Trump for his unwavering support for Israel. During my recent visit to Washington, I said that Donald Trump is the greatest friend that Israel has ever had in the White House. And President Trump shows that friendship each and every day”.
Light years away from these two, it has been the left and left-of-centre which have traditionally led the way in mastering new media, aided by their generally younger, tech-savvy supporters.
For instance Barack Obama was seen as very avant-garde because he used Facebook (FB) to win the White House in 2008.
Today America’s right is ahead.
Mr Trump has cultivated a following among meme-sharing, crypto-trading techies, who are more gung-ho about AI than lefties that fret about boring things like copyright and content ‘guardrails’.
The Labour Party tried to get into this new technology market, unsuccessfully, and released an AI video in January only to be criticised by supporters for undermining the work of human creatives.
All of this just goes to show that as my old journalist trainer used to say: “Check, check, check…”.
The memories of Phil’s, astonishing award-winning career in journalism (during which he always tried to keep up with the latest trends) while he was gripped by the rare neurological disabling condition, Hereditary Spastic Paraplegia (HSP), have been released in a major book ‘A GOOD STORY’. Order the book now!
