Updated August 14, 2024 at 5:26 p.m. ET

One of the things being contested in this presidential campaign is whether the crowds at rallies are even real.

At a Detroit air hangar last week, the Democratic presidential candidate, Vice President Harris, and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, stepped off Air Force Two and were greeted by thousands of supporters. NPR’s Tamara Keith was there to see it.

There were 15,000 people at the rally, according to the Harris campaign. Photos and videos from participants and media organizations captured the audience from many angles.

But former President Donald Trump and his supporters have falsely claimed that the crowd seen in a photo of the rally in front of Harris’ plane was the product of generative artificial intelligence. On Sunday, Trump made the preposterous claim that the very real crowd at the event was a fabrication.

“Did anyone notice that Kamala CHEATED at the airport?” reads one of his posts on Truth Social. “There was no one at the plane, and she ‘AI’d’ it, showing a massive ‘crowd’ of so-called followers, BUT THEY DIDN’T EXIST!”

When a reporter asked him Wednesday why he made the claim given that it turned out to be false, Trump did not admit that his claim had been untrue. “Well, I can’t say what was there, who was there,” Trump responded in an exchange televised by Fox News. “I can tell you about ours — we have the biggest crowd ever in the history of politics.”

The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

The Harris campaign confirmed to NPR that the image in question was taken by a campaign staffer and was not modified by AI.

“Liar’s Dividend”

Refusal to accept basic, verifiable facts has some observers worried about a repeat of the 2020 false claims of a stolen election if Trump loses.

Researchers who study deepfakes have pointed out that the existence of the technology means that people can try claim that authentic videos and photos are fake. Back in 2018, law professors Robert Chesney and Danielle Citron even coined a term for this phenomenon, calling it “liar’s dividend.”

Hany Farid, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley who specializes in forensic imaging, ran the Harris campaign rally photo through two computer models to see if there were any signs of patterns consistent with generative artificial intelligence or manipulation—and found none.

“This is an example where the mere existence of deepfakes and generative AI allows people to deny reality,” Farid said. “You don’t like the fact that Harris-Walz had such a large audience? No problem. Photos are fake. Videos are fake. Everything is fake.”

Farid said such claims muddy the waters, which “is a pretty good strategy if you want to create doubt among voters.”

Then Bernie Sanders, who is an independent but voted with Democrats, said in one statement on Tuesday that Trump’s false comments about the Harris rally are a sign he is laying the groundwork to claim the election was stolen if he loses.

“If you can convince your supporters that thousands of people who attended a televised rally do not exist, it will not be difficult to convince them that election returns in Pennsylvania, Michigan and elsewhere are ‘fake’ and ‘fraudulent’ , Sanders wrote.

The rally photo looked unusual, Farid admitted, because of the lighting and compression. But the features that social media users pointed to as evidence that the image was fake were not correct, Farid said. The distorted hands that some social media posts pointed out were the product of a low-resolution version of the image circulating online.

Farid said he is concerned about the continued debate about the photo’s veracity online, given the lack of evidence that it is anything but genuine and the fact that there are plenty of photos and videos showing the size of the crowd at the rally.

“This is a photo of an event in a city on a day,” Farid said. “I mean, what hope do we have of actually addressing complex problems in society if we can’t agree on this?”

Democracy without shared facts

It’s a problem for citizens in a democracy to have a blurred understanding of what is real and what is staged, said University of California, Los Angeles law professor Rick Hasen. panel discussion hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation on Monday.

“If voters tend not to believe everything they see and believe that everything they see could be false, then they will distrust their own instincts about what the truth is in order to make competent decisions,” Hasen said.

In response to one of Trump’s fake posts about the rally photo, the Harris campaign posted a video from the rally in Detroit with the caption, “In case you forgot @realdonaldtrump: This is what a rally in swing mode looks like.”

While not in the same league as claiming a crowd was made up, the Harris campaign has made its own social media posts about a Trump rally that provided a wrong impression. When Trump held a rally in Atlanta this month, the Harris campaign marked what looked like a bigger crowd for Harris days earlier at the same venue. But the photos of Trump’s audience were taken when the venue was still filling up before all the seats were taken.

Trump’s false claim that Harris “cheated” with a fake crowd likely resonated with his supporters who also believe the bogus claim that Democrats stole the 2020 presidential election, said Mert Bayar, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public.

“It’s part of a belief system that doesn’t trust the other party,” Bayar said.

Also, as the presidential race has shifted with Harris and Walz at the top of the Democratic ticket, many Trump supporters are looking for evidence that their candidate still has the upper hand.

“The vast majority of disinformation is offered as a service to people maintain their belief in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary,” Mike Caulfield, who has studied how rumors spread, wrote in his newsletter, The End(s) of Argumentabout the false claims about the Harris rally photo.

Copyright 2024 NPR