AI has been used this week to transform Republican politicians into drag queens in protest against recent legislation. In one such digital image, Ron DeSantis is pictured in a bookshop looking like a Disney princess. The setting gestures at his recent removal of certain ‘problematic’ texts from classrooms and libraries. One user joked in the comments how he was “Pictured with the only books left in Florida”.
The rise of AI technologies has made it much easier for anyone to edit photographs to a level where reality and fiction blur. While protesting the aforementioned Republican legislation, these particular images also raise important questions pertaining to how or whether we can protect our identities online. Already, there has been much concern about ‘deepfake’ technologies (i.e. the superimposition of anyone’s face onto a video in order to create disturbingly realistic footage). Recently there has been a rise in the use of this technology to create pornographic videos without consent.
Gender identity and sexuality are the ethical points of contention in the RuPublicans series. Should we just treat these images as a harmless case of supercharged satire? British eighteenth- and nineteenth-century political cartoons were certainly unafraid to mock the ‘dandy’ style. However, with deepfake technologies making modern images mind-bogglingly realistic and therefore more personal, the boundaries are certainly blurry. For example, Facebook banned deepfake images in 2020 but announced that their censorship would not apply to satire. Yet, the social media giant rejected the Spectator’s cover featuring a satirical image of Joe Biden. Suddenly I can identify with the confuzzled expression worn by Biden in the banned illustration.