The the rumor mill about immigrants attacking pets started with thinly sourced anecdotes shared at government meetings and on social media. But when AI-generated images and videos featuring the stories went viral, it really took off.
Earlier this week, even before former President Donald Trump shocked viewers with his “pet-eating” speech on Tuesday night, high-profile accounts including tech billionaire Elon Musk shared images of AI-generated caricatures.
Using a variety of artificial intelligence programs, including Musk’s Grok service and a Chinese-owned app, people have created cute and sometimes racist images and videos in seconds suggesting that Trump will protect animals when Vice President Kamala Harris can’t.
And after those photos and videos were shared and re-shared, some of them garnered tens of millions of views and made their way to Trump’s own social media accounts.
Some images shared by social network users show black people chasing cats. In one oft-shared example, an AI-generated Trump runs through a field with a cat under each arm, while two shirtless black men run after him.
This year, many AI experts worried that real-life fakes would pose a major threat to the public debate because of their ability to create convincing audio or video of presidential candidates, but in most cases, the elections were clearly faked by artificial intelligence. joke pictures are quickly produced to accompany the various lines of attack, real or not. Whether or not these images and videos are factual, they often make for a more engaging and shareable post.
AJ Bauer, an associate professor of journalism at the University of Alabama who studies conservative media, said the images show that meme production is becoming more democratized.
“You don’t even have to know Photoshop anymore,” he said, referring to the popular photo editing software developed by Adobe.
“It certainly accelerated the recall of this ‘cat eat dog’ trope,” he said. “It might have taken a little longer or it might have spread a little less without AI, I think AI allows it to spread faster at scale.”
AI is especially useful in this situation, Bauer said, because Trump is popular not a fan of petstherefore, there are relatively few real photos of him with animals. Unlike all other recent presidents, he there was no pet In the White House.
Allegations of Haitian immigrants kidnapping and eating pets they are unreasonablebut they have had real-world consequences, including in Springfield, Ohio, the epicenter of the rumor. There were local schools and government offices targeted with bomb threatsand some said they were Haitian immigrants they fear for their safety.
But cat memes have one unique and long lasting power on the internet: from Angry Cat toCan I have a Cheezburger?“
“Codifying the demonization of immigrants into cute cat content gets people who aren’t open to demonizing immigrants into the game,” Bauer said. “Who doesn’t love a cute cat, right?”
AI-generated pet memes stood out for their variety. There were cats holding military-style rifles to defend themselves, cats holding political signs, cats and ducks sitting side-by-side, AI humans holding cat-related signs, and cats and ducks being hugged by Trump.
And it came like a tsunami, with countless videos and pictures uploaded on social media platforms like Reddit, X, TikTok and Instagram starting last weekend.
Some of the videos and pictures had captions to explain the meme: “Donald Trump saves Springfield, Ohio kittens,” a post on X said. Others shouted “Save them!” was more subtle with text like Others had no explanation.
Images of pets generated by the Pro-Harris AI seemed to be relatively rare, but social media users shared some like this one. a dog in Harris’s hands and “Dogs for Harris” post.
Imran Ahmed, CEO of the Center for Combating Digital Hate, an anti-hate nonprofit, said the memes revealed who likes to poke fun at the expense of racial minorities.
“The reactions of the racists are gratifying. “The reaction of most normal people is confusion or outright anger and opposition, depending on how steeped they are in the underground internet culture,” Ahmed said.
He said memes are also a warning sign about the state of the media.
“We cannot allow our democracy to degenerate into false images that drive discourse,” he said.
Last Sunday on X, far-right activist Jack Posobiec posted an AI image of Trump being run by a group of black men with a cat and a duck in his arms. As of Friday, that post had 1.3 million views. He also wrote a six-second video Trump walking a cat with a group of zombies behind him got 3.5 million views. Posobiec did not respond to a request for comment.
On Monday morning, several accounts on X posted another AI image of Trump being chased by black men, this time holding two kittens. The photo was shared on the @LibsofTikTok account on Tuesday in a post that has garnered 4.8 million views. This image eventually became the host of the night The Jimmy Kimmel Showafter the presidential debate. The @LibsofTikTok account did not respond to a request for comment.
An X account owned by House Judiciary Committee Republicans had perhaps the most-viewed post on Monday: a photo of Trump cradling both a duck and a cat in chest-deep water. There was Over 87 million views from Friday. Committee Republicans did not respond to a request for comment.
On Tuesday, Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Calif., printed that message on a large display board and showed at the committee meeting “My God, are you okay?” he asked Republicans.
On Tuesday and Thursday, Trump himself posted several descriptions of AI on his social media app, Truth Social. Among them was a photo of Trump sitting on a private plane surrounded by animals.
The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
“Anyone with access to general AI could be spinning dozens of these images in no time,” said Alice Marwick, director of research at nonprofit research organization Data & Society.
Marwick compared the images and videos to a kind of instant comic book, with bright colors, extreme detail and a message of easy consumption. For most people, AI-generated content is still gaining traction as a novelty.
“They have an incredibly wide reach and huge viral potential,” he said. But, he added, “to read this picture, you have to feel that immigrants are dangerous.”
Marwick said the whole episode was in some ways a continuation of the strategy Trump and his allies used it in 2016 first flipping it to the White House.
“Since 2016, we have been working in the meme economy in politics,” he said.
Consumers now have a wide range of AI image generators to choose from to create images with a simple text command, and many have rules to protect against election disinformation — for example, not allowing people to take pictures of Harris or Trump — while some AI image generators do not.
According to watermarks on the videos, at least two of the widely viewed AI videos of Trump and animals were created using software from Chinese AI startup MiniMax.
One of them, posted on X on Sunday afternoon, was a video of Trump kissing and whining on the back of his head, “I love you. I would never let Haitians eat you.” It had 2.4 million views as of Friday.
MiniMax and X did not respond to requests for comment about their services allegedly being used to create such images.