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FFrom fake images designed to raise fears of a migrant “invasion” to other demonization campaigns targeting leaders like Emmanuel Macron, far-right parties and activists across Western Europe are at the forefront of the political use of intelligence technology. generative artificial as a political weapon.
According to experts, this year’s European parliamentary elections were the launching pad for the launch of an AI-generated campaign by the European far-right, which has continued to proliferate since.
This month, the issue reached Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta independent oversight board when the body opened an investigation into anti-immigration content on Facebook. The oversight board’s investigation will look into a post from a German account that features an AI-generated image emblazoned with anti-immigrant rhetoric.
It’s part of a wave of AI-created right-wing content on social media. Posts elsewhere on Europe’s political extremes range from the Italian far-right’s deployment of “photorealistic” images of women and children eating insects to bolster a conspiracy theory about the intentions of “a global elite,” to Irish far-right images of a police officer. officer trampling on the Irish flag and Islamophobic memes in the immediate aftermath of the Southport knife murders in the UK.
Using the same models and themes and the same approach to presenting and packaging images on social media platforms has led to a common aesthetic across borders, and in the EU and Britain.
According to experts, in virtually all cases, far-right parties and movements have avoided the use of any type of watermark or identifier on AI images.
“What we are seeing is the tip of the iceberg because what comes from individuals and beyond official channels is even worse,” said Salvatore Romano, head of research at the nonprofit AI Forensics, which examined the production of parties such as the National Party of France. Rally, Reconquête and Les Patriotes.
William Allchorn, a senior researcher at Anglia Ruskin University, said the ease of use of AI models appealed to a political fringe that had shown an attitude of “pragmatic opportunism” towards new technologies.
“AI reduces the barriers to entry for content creation. You don’t need coding skills or anything like that to generate these images. It is also symptomatic that far-right views are becoming mainstream or normalized,” he said, adding that the far-right seemed to have fewer moral concerns about AI images.
Allchorn said that more established political parties seemed more cautious about using AI in official campaigns: “Traditional actors still have ethical concerns about the effectiveness, authenticity and reliability of these models to which far-right or extremist actors are not obligated.”
Germany
The far-right German party Alternative for Germany (AfD) and supporters of its anti-immigrant stance have been avid users of AI image generators. The image under scrutiny by Meta’s content moderation board shows a blonde, blue-eyed woman raising her hand in a stop gesture, with a stop sign and a German flag in the background.
The text above the image says that people should stop coming to Germany because the country does not need more “gang rape specialists” due to the Green Party’s immigration policy.
In September, the AfD branch in Brandenburg produced AI-crafted campaign ads that contrast an idealized Germany of blonde-haired, blue-eyed people with scenes of veiled women walking through the streets and a person waving an LGBTQ+ flag.
Reality Defender, an American deepfake detection company, said the image could have been produced in a matter of minutes.
Other pro-AfD groups on Facebook seen by The Guardian use AI images emblazoned with nativist or anti-immigrant slogans. Another shows a giant pig, an animal whose meat is prohibited in Islam, chasing a group of people dressed in Islamic clothing, with the slogan “Arabic film version of Godzilla.”
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After the Southport stabbings, when a teenager killed three girls, AI was deployed to publicize protests and post Islamophobic content, based on false assumptions about the identity of the alleged attacker. One image showed bearded men in traditional Islamic clothing outside parliament, one brandishing a knife, behind a crying boy in a British flag T-shirt. The tweet read: “We must protect our children!”
Far-right activist Tommy Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, also appeared in AI-generated images and has the technology on his own social media accounts, including a post commemorating D-Day that drew ridicule because it showed the second. world war troops marching from the beach towards the sea.
France
AI generative images were identified as an integral part of the campaign strategy of the most contested political parties during this year’s European and legislative elections in France. Posts on X included images of people approaching a beach in boats, emblazoned with an anti-immigration slogan, and videos criticizing President Emmanuel Macron.
“Only far-right parties consistently used AI-generated imagery to build their websites and depict photorealistic events that never occurred, making it a distinctive and strategic element of their campaigns,” said Romano of AI Forensics.
Ireland
While Ireland does not have a successful far-right party mirroring those in other EU states, the use of generative AI increased among the country’s emerging far-right street movement after the Dublin riots in November 2023.
A frequent meme has featured Conor McGregor, the former mixed martial arts star who has flirted with far-right language and whose anti-government and anti-immigrant messages resonated with far-right groups.
Ciarán O’Connor, senior analyst at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, said a particularly popular post on the city center.
The image was posted by British far-right group Britain First and then tweeted by McGregor himself before deleting it. It received 20 million views.
Since then, O’Connor said generative AI had been used in support of anti-immigration protests and groups and to create content depicting specific scenes that appear intended to evoke anti-immigrant sentiments.
A campaign by the small far-right Irish People’s party included a post on
Italy
In Italy, the populist Lega party posted AI-generated anti-trans and Islamophobic images that included a pregnant bearded man, a group of men in Arabic-style clothing burning a copy of Dante’s Divine Comedy, and Macron posing as a “soldier of the EU” fictitious. , in a message with anti-EU overtones. The political ads were published on Facebook and Instagram and in the social media accounts of the leader of the Lega, Matteo Salvini.
Other images without watermark on Salvini’s account include images of women and children eating insectsa reference to a popular right-wing conspiracy theory that the EU was preparing to make European citizens eat insect-based foods.