When Elon Musk shared a photo of Kamala Harris dressed as a “communist dictator” in X last week, it was pretty obvious it was a phony, since Harris is neither a communist nor, as far as we know, a Soviet cosplayer. And, as many observers noted, the woman in the photo, likely generated by the Grok X tool, bore only a passing resemblance to the vice president.
“AI Still Can’t Accurately Represent Kamala Harris” one user X wrote“Looks like they posted some random Latina.”
“Grok dressed old Eva Longoria in a chic outfit and called it a day,” another joked, noting the resemblance of the “dictator” in the photo to Desperate housewives star.
“AI simply CANNOT recreate Kamala Harris” third published“It’s amazing how badly the algorithm failed an AMERICAN (of South Indian and Jamaican descent).”
Many Artificial intelligence pictures With Harris are similarly bad. Tweet featuring AI-Generated Video showing Harris and Donald Trump in a romantic relationship — culminating in her holding an illegitimate child who looks like Trump — has nearly 28 million views on X. Over the course of the montage, Harris morphs into what look like different people, while Trump’s clearly better visuals remain fairly consistent.
When we tried to utilize Grok to create a photo of Harris and Trump putting their differences aside to read a copy of WIRED, the results repeatedly depicted the former president accurately while Harris was incorrect. The vice president appeared with different features, hairstyles, and skin tones. Several times, she looked more like former First Lady Michelle Obama.
Grok differs from some popular AI image generators in that it allows users to create phony photos of political figures. Earlier this year, Midjourney started blocking users from creating images of Trump and President Joe Biden. (The ban also includes Harris.) The decision comes after the publication report by the Center for Combating Digital Hate, which found that the tool could be used to generate a range of politically motivated images.
Similarly, OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini refused to produce images of Harris or Trump in WIRED’s tests. Meanwhile, many open-source image generators, such as Grok, will produce images of politicians. WIRED found one such model, Stable Diffusion, that also produced subpar images of Harris.
Up-to-date AI image generators utilize so-called diffusion models to generate images from text clues. These models are fed with many thousands of labeled images, usually downloaded from the web or collected from other sources. Joaquin Cuenca Abela, CEO FreepikA company that provides various AI tools, including several image generators, told WIRED that the difficulty such generators have in recalling Harris, compared to Trump, is because they are given fewer well-described photos.
Despite being a high-profile figure, Harris hasn’t been as widely photographed as Trump. A WIRED search of the image provider Getty Images confirms this; it returned 63,295 photos of Harris compared to Trump’s 561,778. Given her relatively recent entry into the presidential race, Harris is a “new star” when it comes to AI imagers, according to Cuenca Abel. “It always takes a few months to catch up,” he says.