Fake AI-generated videos of Venezuelans celebrating President Nicolás Maduro’s capture flooded social media this week. The clips looked real enough. But the more troubling part wasn’t how convincing they were.
Key Takeaways
- Fake Maduro celebration videos went viral after Musk reposted them.
- John Herrman: the real problem isn’t fooling people, it’s that nobody cares.
- Vibes outrun verification, no matter how careful newsrooms get.
It was who was sharing them.
As John Herrman writes in New York Magazine’s Intelligencer, Elon Musk widely shared and reposted the fabricated celebration videos to his massive following. That’s notable because Musk is “perhaps the best equipped in the entire world to know that they weren’t real.” He runs an AI company connected to a social network with a fact-checking system.
The old hypothesis about AI disinformation assumed bad actors would trick unsuspecting masses with realistic fake videos. The reality is stranger.
“They were passed around by a powerful person with a large following…for an audience of people who do not care whether they are” real, Herrman writes.
Even X’s own chatbot Grok got duped. Reuters reports the bot initially told users the video “shows real footage of celebrations in Venezuela.” It later acknowledged the video “appears to be manipulated” only after being challenged.
The clips served as what Herrman calls “ambient ideological slop for backfilling a desired political reality.” They weren’t meant to persuade skeptics. They gave true believers something satisfying to share.
This creates a new challenge for newsrooms. Traditional fact-checking assumes people want the truth but lack access to it. What happens when the audience treats reality as optional?
The answer may be sobering. AI disinformation isn’t primarily causing chaos or confusion. Instead, Herrman writes, it’s creating “a perverse form of order in which persuasion is unimportant, disinformation is primarily directed at ideological allies, and everyone gets to see exactly what they want.”
