Incident 862: AI-Generated Video Falsely Depicts Martin Luther King Jr. Supporting Donald Trump

Description: A deepfake video falsely depicting Martin Luther King Jr. endorsing Donald Trump circulated on X, where it was viewed over 10 million times. The video, created by pro-Trump accounts, was condemned by King’s daughter, Bernice King, who called it “vile” and demanded its removal.

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Entities

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Alleged: Unknown deepfake technology developer developed an AI system deployed by Pro-Trump social media accounts , MAGA Resource , Ramble Rants , Dilley Meme Team and X (Twitter), which harmed Martin Luther King Jr. , Bernice King , Family of Martin Luther King Jr. , Electoral integrity and Democracy.

Alleged implicated AI systems: X (Twitter) and Unknown deepfake tool

Incident Stats

Incident ID

862

Report Count

Incident Date

2024-11-03

Editors

Daniel Atherton

Applied Taxonomies

MIT

MIT Taxonomy Classifications

Machine-Classified

Taxonomy Details

Risk Subdomain

4.1. Disinformation, surveillance, and influence at scale

Risk Domain

Malicious Actors & Misuse

Entity

Human

Timing

Post-deployment

Intent

Intentional

Incident Reports

Reports Timeline

A deepfake showed MLK Jr. backing Trump. His daughter calls it ‘vile.’

washingtonpost.com

MLK Jr.’s daughter demands MAGA account delete ‘vile’ deepfake

thehill.com

MLK Jr’s daughter calls for pro-Trump account to remove deepfake video of her father ‘endorsing’ Trump

the-independent.com

washingtonpost.com · 2024

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s daughter Bernice on Monday condemned an artificially generated video of the Civil Rights leader praising former president Donald Trump, as both parties court Black voters ahead of Election Day.

The video, p…

thehill.com · 2024

Bernice King, daughter of civil rights icon the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., is calling for a Trump-supporting social media account to remove an ad featuring her father generated by artificial intelligence (AI).

In a video posted to the so…

the-independent.com · 2024

The daughter of Martin Luther King Jr has rebuked an AI-generated video that depicts the long-dead civil rights leader endorsing Donald Trump.

The video, which features a synthetic version of King's voice and likeness, was posted on the soc…

Variants

A "variant" is an incident that shares the same causative factors, produces similar harms, and involves the same intelligent systems as a known AI incident. Rather than index variants as entirely separate incidents, we list variations of incidents under the first similar incident submitted to the database. Unlike other submission types to the incident database, variants are not required to have reporting in evidence external to the Incident Database. Learn more from the research paper.

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