When Donald Trump shared a slew of AI-generated images this week that falsely depicted Taylor Swift and her followers endorsing his marketing campaign for president, the previous US president was amplifying the work of a murky non-profit with aspirations to bankroll rightwing media influencers and a historical past of spreading misinformation.
A number of of the pictures Trump posted on his Reality Social platform, which confirmed digitally rendered younger girls in “Swifties for Trump” T-shirts, have been the merchandise of the John Milton Freedom Basis. Launched final yr, the Texas-based non-profit group frames itself as a press freedom group with the objective of “empowering unbiased journalists” and “fortifying the bedrock of democracy”.
The group’s day-to-day operations seem to revolve round sharing engagement bait on X and in search of thousands and thousands from donors for a “fellowship program” chaired by a highschool sophomore that will award $100,000 to Twitter personalities equivalent to Glenn Greenwald, Andy Ngo and Lara Logan, in keeping with a evaluate of the group’s tax information, investor paperwork and social media output. The John Milton Freedom Basis did not return request for remark to a set of questions on its operations and fellowship program.
After months of retweeting conservative media influencers and echoing Elon Musk’s claims that freedom of speech is underneath assault from leftwing forces, one of many group’s messages discovered its technique to Trump after which his thousands and thousands of supporters.
Disinformation researchers have lengthy warned that generative AI has the flexibility to decrease the bar for creating deceptive content material and threaten data round elections. After Musk’s xAI firm launched its largely unregulated Grok picture generator final week, there was a surge of AI content material that has included depictions of Trump, Kamala Harris and different political figures. The Milton Freedom Basis is one in every of many small teams flooding social media with so-called AI slop.
A distinct segment non-profit’s AI slop makes its technique to Trump
Through the spike in AI photos on X, the conservative @amuse account posted the images of AI-generated Swift followers to greater than 300,000 followers. On the textual content of the publish, which was labeled “satire”, was a watermark that said it was “sponsored by the John Milton Freedom Basis”. Trump posted a screenshot of @amuse’s tweet on Reality Social.
The @amuse account has appreciable attain itself, with about 390,000 followers on X and dozens of day by day posts. Operating @amuse seems to be Alexander Muse, listed as a advisor within the investor prospectus of the Milton Basis, who additionally writes a rightwing commentary Substack that features posts exploring election conspiracy theories. The @amuse account has quite a few connections with Muse. The X account is related to a Substack posting the identical precise articles that Muse publishes on his LinkedIn web page, which additionally has the username “amuse”, reflecting his first preliminary and final identify. Muse’s guide on methods to safe startup funding, which incorporates examples of him asking ChatGPT to fake it’s Musk and provide enterprise recommendation, lists that very same Substack account as its writer.
Outstanding accounts together with Musk have shared and replied to @amuse’s posts, which lately have included AI depictions of Trump combating Darth Vader and sexualized imagery of Harris. Its banner image is at the moment an AI-generated picture of Trump surrounded by girls in “Swifties” shirts. The account posts deceptive, pro-Trump headlines equivalent to claiming Harris turned a whole lot of hundreds of youngsters over to human traffickers as “border czar”. The headlines, just like the AI-generated Swifties for Trump photos, include the watermark “sponsored by the John Milton Freedom Basis”.
The John Milton Freedom Basis, named after the Seventeenth-century British poet and essayist, has a small on-line footprint: an internet site, an investor prospectus and an X account with fewer than 500 followers. The group behind it, in keeping with its personal paperwork, consists of 5 individuals primarily based within the Dallas-Fort Value space with various levels of expertise in Republican politics. Muse’s daughter, described as a tenth grade honor scholar on the non-profit’s web site, serves because the Milton Basis’s “fellowship chair”.
The muse’s said objective is to lift $2m from main donors to award $100,000 grants to an inventory of “fellows” made up of rightwing media influencers. These embody individuals like the previous CBS journalist turned far-right star Lara Logan, who was cut from Newsmax lately for occurring a QAnon-inspired rant that claimed world leaders drink kids’s blood, in addition to the creator of an anti-trans kids’s guide. The group believes that this cash would permit these already established influencers to “enhance their attain by greater than 10x in lower than a yr”, in keeping with its investor prospectus.
Whereas solely one of many fellows listed on the inspiration’s web site mentions the group on their X profiles and none observe its account, the @amuse account has a distinguished hyperlink to the group’s group web page and the inspiration typically engages with its posts.
It isn’t clear that the inspiration has any cash to present and if all of the media influencers listed as its 2024 fellowship class know in regards to the group. One Texas-based account that posts anti-vaccine content material lists itself as a “JMFF” fellow of their bio, however not one of the others promote any connection. The newest tax information for the Freedom Basis place it within the class of non-profits whose gross receipts, or complete funds acquired from all sources, vary from $0 to $50,000 – far under the thousands and thousands it’s in search of.
The group’s board consists of its chair, Brad Merritt, who’s touted as an skilled Republican organizer with claims to have raised $300m for varied non-profits; its director, Shiree Sanchez, who served as assistant director of the Republican celebration of Texas between 1985 and 1986; and Mark Karaffa, a retired healthcare business government.
Muse’s expertise in digital media seems to be way more in depth than the non-profit’s different members. Along with his weblog, he claims to have labored with James O’Keefe, the previous CEO of the rightwing group Project Veritas, who was recognized for hidden digicam stings till he was ousted last year over allegations of misplaced funds. Muse, who’s described within the prospectus as a “serial entrepreneur”, additionally blogs about methods to generate profits from generative AI.