When Elon Musk shared a photo showing Kamala Harris dresses up as a “communist dictator” on X last week, it’s pretty clearly a fake, since Harris isn’t a communist or, as far as we know, a Soviet cosplayer. And, as many observers noted, the woman in the photo, presumably created by X’s Grok tool, bore only a passing resemblance to the vice president.
“AI still doesn’t accurately describe Kamala Harris,” wrote one X user. “Looks like they’re posting a random Latina girl.”
“Grok put old Eva Longoria in a snazzy dress and called it a day,” said another, noting the resemblance to the “dictator” pictured in Desperate Housewives star
“AI CANNOT replicate Kamala Harris,” a third posted. “Surprising how much the algorithm failed an AMERICAN (of South Indian and Jamaican heritage).”
Many images of Harris’s AI are similarly bad. Meanwhile, a tweet featuring a AI generated video which shows Harris and Donald Trump in a romantic relationship—it ends with her holding their beloved son, who looks just like Trump—has nearly 28 million views on X. Throughout the montage, Harris changes what she looks like by different people, while the noticeably better Trump remains the same image.
When we tried using Grok to create a picture of Harris and Trump putting aside their differences to read WIRED’s copy, the results repeatedly depicted the former president accurately while getting the vice president wrong. Harris came out with different features, hairstyles, and skin tones. In some ways, she looks more like former First Lady Michelle Obama.
Grok differs from some high-profile AI image generators in that it allows users to create fake images of political figures. Earlier this year, Midjourney began blocking its users from creating images of Trump and President Joe Biden. (The ban extends to Harris.) The move follows the publication of a report by the Center for Countering Digital Hate that found the tool could be used to generate a range of politically charged images.
Similarly, OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini refused to produce images of Harris or Trump in WIRED’s test. Meanwhile, a number of open source image generators will, like Grok, create images of politicians. WIRED found one such model, Stable Diffusion, also produced poor photos of Harris.
Modern AI image generators use so-called diffusion models to generate images from text prompts. These models are fed thousands of labeled images, usually taken from the web or collected from other sources. Joaquin Cuenca Abela, CEO of Freepik, a company that hosts various AI tools, including several image generators, told WIRED that the difficulty of such generators to believe Harris, compared to Trump, is that they are fed fewer well-labeled images.
Despite being a celebrity, Harris has not been photographed as much as Trump. A WIRED search of photo supplier Getty Images confirms this; it returned 63,295 photos of Harris compared to 561,778 of Trump. Given his relatively recent entry into the presidential race, Harris is “a new celebrity,” as far as the AI ​​image maker is concerned, according to Cuenca Abela. “It always takes a few months to catch on,” he said.
