When Elon Musk shared an image showing Kamala Harris dressed as a “communist dictator” Last week on X, it became clear that this was a fake, as Harris is neither a communist nor, as far as we know, a Soviet cosplayer. And, as many observers noted, the woman in the photo, presumably generated by X’s Grok tool, bore only a superficial resemblance to the vice president.
“AI still can’t accurately represent Kamala Harris” An X user wrote“It looks like they’re posting some random Latina woman.”
“Grok dressed old Eva Longoria in a fancy outfit and said goodbye,” another joked, pointing out the similarity of the “dictator” portrayed to the Desperate Housewives star.
“AI simply CANNOT replicate Kamala Harris” a third published“It’s astonishing how flawed the algorithm is on an American (of South Indian and Jamaican descent).”
Many AI images of Harris are equally bad. A tweet that features a AI generated video The video showing Harris and Donald Trump in a romantic relationship (which culminates with her holding her son, who resembles Trump) has nearly 28 million views on X. Throughout the montage, Harris transforms into what appear to be different people, while Trump’s noticeably better image remains fairly consistent.
When we tried using Grok to create a photo of Harris and Trump putting aside their differences to read a copy of WIRED, the results repeatedly showed the former president accurately, while Harris got it wrong. The vice president appeared with different features, hairstyles, and skin tones. On some occasions, she looked more like former first lady Michelle Obama.
Grok differs from some high-profile AI image generators in that it allows users to create fake photos of political figures. Earlier this year, Midjourney began to block its users believe images of Trump and President Joe Biden. (The ban extends to Harris.) The move followed the publication of a report by the Center for Countering Digital Hate, which found that the tool could be used to generate a variety of politically charged images.
Similarly, OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini refused to produce images of Harris or Trump in WIRED’s tests. Meanwhile, several open-source image generators, such as Grok, will produce images of politicians. WIRED found that one such model, Stable Diffusion, also produced not-so-great images of Harris.
Modern AI image generators use what are known as diffusion models to generate images from text prompts. These models are fed with thousands of labeled images, usually scraped from the web or collected from other sources. Joaquin Cuenca Abela, CEO of Free beakA company that hosts several AI tools, including several image generators, tells WIRED that the difficulty such generators have in conjuring up Harris, compared to Trump, is that they have been fed fewer well-labeled images.
Despite being a prominent figure, Harris hasn’t been photographed as much as Trump. WIRED’s search of photo provider Getty Images confirms this: it turned up 63,295 images of Harris compared to 561,778 of Trump. Given her relatively recent entry into the presidential race, Harris is “a new celebrity,” as far as AI image makers are concerned, according to Cuenca Abela. “It always takes a few months to catch up,” he says.
