By Marianna Spring

WASHINGTON — Donald Trump supporters have been creating and sharing AI-generated fake images of black voters to encourage African Americans to vote Republican.

BBC Panorama discovered dozens of deepfakes portraying black people as supporting the former president.

Trump has openly courted black voters, who were key to Joe Biden's election win in 2020.

But there's no evidence directly linking these images to Trump's campaign.

The co-founder of Black Voters Matter, a group that encourages black people to vote, said the manipulated images were pushing a "strategic narrative" designed to show Trump as popular in the black community.

A creator of one of the images told the BBC: "I'm not claiming it's accurate."

The fake images of black Trump supporters, generated by artificial intelligence (AI), are one of the emerging disinformation trends ahead of the US presidential election in November.

Unlike in 2016, when there was evidence of foreign influence campaigns, the AI-generated images found by the BBC appear to have been made and shared by US voters themselves.

One of them was Mark Kaye and his team at a conservative radio show in Florida.

They created an image of Trump smiling with his arms around a group of black women at a party and shared it on Facebook, where Kaye has more than one million followers.

At first it looks real, but on closer inspection everyone's skin is a little too shiny and there are missing fingers on people's hands - some tell-tale signs of AI-created images.

"I'm not a photojournalist," Kaye tells me from his radio studio.

"I'm not out there taking pictures of what's really happening. I'm a storyteller."

He had posted an article about black voters supporting Trump and attached this image to it, giving the impression that these people all support the former president's run for the White House.

In the comments on Facebook, several users appeared to believe the AI image was real.

"I'm not claiming it is accurate. I'm not saying, 'Hey, look, Donald Trump was at this party with all of these African American voters. Look how much they love him!'" he said.

"If anybody's voting one way or another because of one photo they see on a Facebook page, that's a problem with that person, not with the post itself."

Another widely viewed AI image the BBC investigation found shows Trump posing with black voters on a front porch. It had originally been posted by a satirical account that generates images of the former president, but only gained widespread attention when it was reposted with a new caption falsely claiming that he had stopped his motorcade to meet these people.

BBC tracked down the person behind the account called Shaggy, who is a committed Trump supporter living in Michigan.

"[My posts] have attracted thousands of wonderful kind-hearted Christian followers," he said in messages sent to the BBC on social media.

When I tried to question him on the AI-generated image he blocked me. His post has had over 1.3 million views, according to the social media site X. Some users called it out, but others seemed to have believed the image was real.

I did not find similarly manipulated images of Joe Biden with voters from a particular demographic. The AI images of the president tend to feature him alone or with other world leaders such as Russian President Vladimir Putin or former US President Barack Obama.

Some are created by critics, others by supporters.

In January, the Democratic candidate was himself a victim of an AI-generated impersonation.

An automated audio call, purportedly voiced by the president, urged voters to skip the New Hampshire primary where he was running. A Democratic Party supporter has admitted responsibility, saying he wanted to draw attention to the potential for the technology to be abused.

Cliff Albright, the co-founder of campaign group Black Voters Matter, said there appeared to be a resurgence of disinformation tactics targeting the black community, as in the 2020 election.

"There have been documented attempts to target disinformation to black communities again, especially younger black voters," he said.

A recent New York Times and Sienna College poll found that in six key swing states 71% of black voters would back Biden in 2024, a steep drop from the 92% nationally that helped him win the White House at the last election.

Albright said the fake images were consistent with a "very strategic narrative" pushed by conservatives - from the Trump campaign down to influencers online - designed to win over black voters. They are particularly targeting young black men, who are thought to be more open to voting for Trump than black women.

On Monday, MAGA Inc, the main political action committee backing Trump, is due to launch an advertising campaign targeting black voters in Georgia, Michigan and Pennsylvania.

It is aimed at voters like Douglas, a taxi driver in Atlanta. — BBC