The creator of the viral video “Trump Gaza” generated by the Gaza Strip as a Dubai style paradise said that it was conceived as a political satire of “the megalomaniac idea” of Trump.
The video – published by Trump on his social account Truth last week – depicts a family emerging from the wreck of Gaza torn by the war in a seaside resort by the beach bordered by skyscrapers. Trump is seen by sipping cocktails with a Benjamin Netanyahu with bare breasts on the lounge chairs, while Elon Musk tears the flat bread in a dip.
The video appeared for the first time in February, shortly after Trump unveiled his real estate development plan for Gaza, under which he said he wanted to “clean” the population of around 2 million people to create the “Riviera du Middle East”.
Trump then published the clip without any explanation on his social platform Truth on February 26.
Solo Avital, a filmmaker based in Los Angeles, said that he had created the video in less than eight hours while experimenting with IA tools in early February, and that his spread had “surprised the hell of me”.
“We are storytellers, we are not provocateurs, we sometimes make pieces of satire like this was supposed to be. It is the duality of satire: it depends on the context you bring there to make the punchline or the joke. Here, there was no context and it was published without our consent or knowledge, “he added.
Avital, who is an American citizen born in Israel, and his trading partner, Ariel Vromen – Director of the film of 2012, The Iceman, with Michael Shannon, Winona Ryder and Chris Evans – Run Eyemix, a society of visualities where they produce documentaries and advertisements.
Avital said he was experimenting with the Arcana AI platform and decided to create “a satire on this megalomaniac idea of putting statues [in Gaza]“To see what the tool could do.
He had shared the video clip with friends, while his trading partner published him on his popular Instagram for a few hours, before Avital encourages him to remove him on the ground “it could be a little insensitive and we do not want to take sides”.
The couple shared a first version with Mel Gibson, whom Trump appointed special ambassador to Hollywood in January and who has already collaborated with Eyemix and Arcana. Gibson told them that he had shared another video on Los Angeles fires with people close to Trump, but denied having shared the Gaza video with the president, the creators said.
The first Avital knew that the video had reached a wider audience when he woke up to thousands of messages on his phone, while friends alerted him from Trump’s position.
Avital said he was surprised by some of the video reactions. “If it was the sketch for Saturday Night Live, all the perception of this in the media would be the opposite – look at what extent this president is wild and his ideas, everyone thinks that it is a joke.”
He said that the experience had strengthened for him “how the false news spread when each network takes what they want and push it in their viewers with their attached stories”.
He hoped that this experience “would trigger a public debate on rights and wrongs” of the generative AI, including the rights of creators.
However, as a professional in creative industries, he said that he had generally welcomed AI, saying that it is “the best thing that has happened to long -term creativity. Everyone who thinks it will kill creativity, we are proof of the contrary. This film would not have been created without human intervention. »»
Hany Farid, professor at the University of California in Berkeley, specializing in the identification of Deepfakes, said that it was “not the first time and will not be the last time” that the clips generated by AI on news events would become viral. He noted that there had been a burst of content created around Los Angeles forest fires, including a video of a Burnt Oscars trophy.
He said that Avital’s experience should make people realize “there is nothing like” I just shared with a friend “. You do something, suppose you don’t have control.
He added the fact that the video was conceived as a political satire but reused as a “very convincing and visceral” propaganda of Trump stressed the risk of video generated by AI.
“This allows individuals without much time, money and, frankly, skills you would normally need, to generate fairly breathtaking content. It’s really cool, you can’t chat, “he said.
But there is an obscure side to this new capacity: “This technology is used to create sexual children’s abuse, intimate non -consensual images, cannular, plots, dangerous lies for democracies.”
Although this video is obviously generated by computer, because the videos are generally not hyper realistic, it warned: “it’s to come”. “What’s going on when you get to a point where every video, audio, everything you read and see online can be false?” Where is our sense of shared reality?
He thinks that AI platforms are responsible for “putting railings” on this technology, to prevent it from being misunderstood. “Many follow this model of” getting around quickly and breaking things “, and they break things again. We could forgive this state of mind at the dawn of the modern Internet, no one looks at this thought that we need more, no more Elon Musk, no more Mark Zuckerberg. »»
