But Trump is never one to accept documentation as convincing. After The Washington Post published the “Access Hollywood” tape in which Trump described assaulting women in a manner similar to what Carroll alleged, he told some allies that the audio was not authentic (despite having admitted to making the comments when they were first revealed). When Vice President Kamala Harris had large crowds at an event in Michigan, Trump falsely claimed that images of the event were generated by artificial intelligence.
That’s what he said about the Carroll photo on Friday, too.
“They have a picture from, they say, about 40 years ago, a picture,” Trump said. “And the picture depicts her and her husband on a celebrity line where I was the celebrity. I was — been a celebrity for a long time. And they were shaking my hands along with hundreds of other people. Nobody even knows where it is.”
As the caption indicated, it was apparently at an NBC party.
“All I can say is that I never met the woman other than this picture, which could have been AI-generated, I don’t know,” Trump said later. “Showed up out of nowhere, but it’s just fine. Nice picture with her, her husband and lots of other people are on line. It’s a celebrity line.” He then again reiterated that he was famous at the time.
There is no way that the image was generated by artificial intelligence. For one thing, there’s no reason to believe that it is, that Trump — who was a fixture in the New York social scene at the time — wouldn’t have been in the presence of a local television star and his writer wife. There’s no reason to believe that Carroll, eager to make her case in her book and to the magazine, took out her supercomputer and created a convincing simulation of such an encounter.
Particularly since, when the New York excerpt was published, the technology to make convincing photos was not yet available. By now, we’re all familiar enough with the technology to have it feel as though it’s been around for a long time, but it hasn’t been. It wasn’t until years after the book came out that even the first rudimentary AI models were available. Even today, generating an image with the clarity and accuracy of that photo would be tricky.