HISPI Project Cerebellum
AI Incidents

GOP Pollster Reportedly Shares Purportedly AI-Generated Images to Fabricate Appearance of Black Voter Support

February 1, 2024

Purportedly AI-generated images circulated by GOP pollster Patrick Ruffini reportedly depicted Black men appearing to support the Republican Party shortly before Black History Month. The allegedly fabricated photos created a misleading impression of racial diversity within the GOP and may have shaped public perception. The episode raises concerns about the reported use of AI to distort political representation and the potential impact on Black communities.
Alleged deployer
patrick-ruffini
Alleged developer
unknown-ai-image-generator-developer, unknown-deepfake-technology-developers
Alleged harmed parties
general-public, democracy, black-americans, african-american-voters, general-public-of-the-united-states, epistemic-integrity, electoral-integrity, truth

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/682

Data source

Incident data is from the AI Incident Database (AIID).

When citing the database as a whole, please use:

McGregor, S. (2021) Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-21). Virtual Conference.

Pre-print on arXiv · Database snapshots & citation guide

We use weekly snapshots of the AIID for stable reference. For the official suggested citation of a specific incident, use the “Cite this incident” link on each incident page.