Daddy Issues Deepfakes were little more than a looming threat last election cycle, but this time around they seem almost certain to have a corrosive effect on the discourse. That doesn’t always mean that AI-generated fakes are mistaken for the real thing. The very existence of AI-generated imagery and audio, experts have pointed out, means that politicians who were actually caught saying something dumb or bad have a new excuse: they can just blame the embarrassing footage on AI. Nobody has leaned into that convenient new reality harder than one-time president and current mass defendent Donald Trump, who’s already falsely claimed multiple times that genuine video and photos of him were the product of AI. Now, the Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump political action committee that Trump claimed — wrongly — had used AI to generate unflattering clips of him, is flipping the script by using AI to summon up footage of Trump’s long-deceased dad to excoriate his son in a vicious attack ad. “Donny, I always knew you’d blow it,” says the AI-generated ghost of Fred Trump, who died in 1999. “I bailed you out so many times. Your deals were all garbage. You couldn’t even make money off a casino, you fuck up. I’m ashamed you have my name.” Father Figure The AI-generated Fred Trump continues to lay into his son. “Everyone knows why the women leave you,” it says. “You’re boring, broke, and I told you not to get fat. You pay porn stars and you are weak down…Trump's Dad Resurrected Via AI to Tell Son He's a Disgrace