Former President Donald Trump is keen to boast about his crowd sizes and attack his political rivals over theirs. But his Aug. 11 claim that 2024 opponent Vice President Kamala Harris used artificial intelligence to paint a picture of a nonexistent crowd at one of her events upped the ante on election year attacks.
“Has anyone noticed that Kamala CHEATED at the airport?” Trump wrote in an Aug. 11 Truth Social post. “There was nobody at the plane, and she ‘A.I.’d’ it, and showed a massive ‘crowd’ of so-called followers, BUT THEY DIDN’T EXIST!”
Responding to a social media post he reshared that included a picture showing Harris’ plane surrounded by a large crowd of people — some with Harris-Walz campaign signs — Trump wrote that it amounted to a “fake crowd picture.”
“She had NOBODY waiting, and the ‘crowd’ looked like 10,000 people!” he wrote. One minute later, Trump posted again: “Look, we caught her with a fake ‘crowd.’ There was nobody there!”
Trump’s claim is baseless. Thousands of people attended the Aug. 7 Harris campaign event in Romulus, Michigan, a southwest suburb of Detroit.
Dozens of photos and videos of the event — including from journalists at Getty Images and The Associated Press — show that Harris-Walz supporters gathered at Michigan’s Detroit Metropolitan Airport for the rally.
Air Force Two with Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz aboard arrive for a campaign rally Wednesday, Aug. 7, 2024, in Romulus, Mich. (AP Photo/Carlos Osorio)
The Detroit News reported that Harris and allies “rallied thousands of supporters” Aug. 7 who were “packed inside and outside an airplane hangar.” The Detroit Free Press reported that “several thousand supporters” lined up hours in advance to get inside the airport for the event. Similarly, WDIV, a local TV channel, reported that “thousands of people were there.”
For those inquiring about Kamala Harris’ Michigan rally crowd size — here is the view of both inside and outside the hangar at DTW before, during and after the rally.
🎥: Kayman Whaley, TDN.
Stay with us at https://t.co/SwQpP52S0b for live, accurate updates. pic.twitter.com/6K48qjKtfo
— The Detroit News (@detroitnews) August 8, 2024
We contacted the Trump campaign for comment and received no response.
A Harris campaign spokesperson told PolitiFact that a campaign staff member took the crowd photo that Trump reshared and it was not generated or modified by AI.
“This is an actual photo of a 15,000-person crowd for Harris-Walz in Michigan,” the Harris campaign wrote in an Aug. 11 X post, sharing the contested photo.
Hany Farid, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley’s School of Information and an expert on digital forensics and image analysis, said he has “no doubt that the photo is real.”
Farid said he analyzed the photo using two different computer models trained to detect patterns associated with generative AI images. Neither detected evidence of AI-generation or manipulation.
“The haloing effect around many of the heads/bodies is, I believe, due to the unusual lighting in the hangar,” Farid said in an email. Also, he said, “many other” videos and photos of the rally show “the same basic scene.”
People listen to Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris speak at a campaign rally at Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County Airport, Wednesday, August 7, 2024, in Romulus, MI. (AP Photo/Julia Nikhinson)
“Comparing several versions of this photo, I think the only alteration was some simple brightness/contrast and perhaps sharpening,” Farid said.
Lavora Barnes, Michigan’s Democratic Party chair, shared a photo on X of herself addressing the Aug. 7 crowd and joked about Trump’s AI-generated crowd claim.
“I’m honored that whoever made the AI image of 15,000 excited Democrats welcoming @kamalaharris and @tim_walz to Detroit was kind enough to include me at the lectern,” she wrote Aug. 11 on X. “That AI crowd was really loud, my ears just stopped ringing from their imaginary cheering.”
Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz arrive for a campaign rally Wednesday, Aug. 7, 2024, in Romulus, Mich. (AP Photo/Carlos Osorio)
How did the AI-generated photo narrative spread?
On Truth Social, Trump shared a screenshot of conservative commentator Chuck Callesto’s Aug. 10 X post. Callesto — whose Instagram profile picture is a 2022 image of himself and Trump — posted his false claim that the Harris campaign was using a “FAKE crowd photo” at 2:47 p.m. ET. His post had been viewed more than 14.4 million times as of the evening of Aug. 12.
(Screenshot/Truth Social)
Callesto was not the first person to use photos to sow doubt about the crowd size at Harris’ Michigan rally. Blog sites linked to Italy and India shared posts Aug. 8 and Aug. 9 that questioned the rally photos’ authenticity.
Paid X subscribers also shared close-up photos of Air Force Two at the rally as early as 12:46 p.m. ET on Aug. 10, claiming that the reflections on the plane proved there was no crowd.
Jake Shields, a mixed martial arts fighter with 735,000 followers on X, promoted this theory. “Harris is using AI to fake crowd size,” he posted at 4:46 p.m. Aug. 10. Just after 6 p.m., conservative commentator and Trump supporter Dinesh D’Souza amplified the claim.
Trump said a photo of Harris’ Aug. 7 rally near Detroit was AI-generated, that “there was nobody there” and the attendees pictured “didn’t exist.”
Local news organizations reported that thousands of people attended the rally, and photos and videos show the same scene at the airplane hangar. An expert on detecting manipulated images analyzed the photo and found no evidence it was AI-generated or manipulated.
We rate the claim Pants on Fire!
PolitiFact researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this report.
This fact check was originally published by PolitiFact, which is part of the Poynter Institute. See the sources for this fact check here.
