Navigating Reality and War During the Age of AI Propaganda

And, um, one of the reasons I wanted to have you on is I, I, I had this interaction last month, uh, where a friend sent me a tweet from... uh, or a, a Truth Social post from Donald Trump in s- you know, it was a... him screen capping somebody else's account on X.

It was a photo- eight photographs of women kind of looking direct at camera, and these are, were Iranian women that Trump said were... or the original post said, and Trump was then broadcasting were set to be executed by the Iranian regime.

My friend shows me this and he says, "Can you believe that the president is passing off these AI generated photos as real?" Um, and I looked at it and I said, uh, to my friend, like, "Are we sure that that's what's actually going on here?" And I started to dig around a little bit, um, and discovered that they were very real women, but also that that is just, like, a part of the story.

Um, and I kind of got... and it was a b- I was having a busy day, and I got to this point kind of looking into this where I think a lot of us get, and you've written about, where I just tossed up my hands and I backed away and I said, "I can't...

I don't have the bandwidth right now to figure out what's truth, what's fiction, what's going on." Um, and that is what you do.

Th- [laughs] that is where the, most of your bandwidth goes to, is sussing out truth from lies, and also kind of analyzing what AI is doing to us right now, and what digital technology is doing to us right now, and why so many of us are throwing up our hands.

So, I mean, we can back all the way up to, like, April 21st, uh, and the original post on X.

Can you kind of walk us through the beats of what happened over, like, that 48 hours?

Is...

Do we start on the day of the post, or do we start at, uh, I don't know.

There's so many places you could start-

Yeah

...

when it comes to this story, right?

I think for, for our audience, let's start on the day of the post, because I think...

This is a, a, I'm gonna say a, a really messed up sentence, but I think the, that initial post on the 21st and then Trump broadcasting it on Truth Social is maybe when some of this... people start paying attention to some of these things, if that makes sense.

Right.

Yeah.

So I mean, that day, um, when he does post, um, it's in the middle of, you know, the ceasefire negotiations that are going on between the US and Iran.

And throughout this whole conflict, there has been this narrative, you know, both from Israel and the US, that, you know, the human rights of Iranians, the freedom of Iranians is part of the story.

It's part of why the conflict is happening.

And I mean, I think we all know, given the human rights situation in both these respected countries, that human rights isn't [laughs] often central, and it's a little bit, um, insincere to consider that they would care about the human rights of Iranians or Iranian protesters, but this has been very central to the narrative.

It's been central to a lot of the war propaganda, of course.

Um, and you know, we can unpack the, the war propaganda coming from the side of, uh, the Iranian regime as well.

But, um, this has been part of the story.