By MATT BROWN and DAVID KLEPPER (Associated Press)

WASHINGTON (AP) — At first glance, images circulating online showing former President Donald Trump surrounded by groups of Black people smiling and laughing seem nothing out of the ordinary, but a look closer is telling.

Odd lighting and too-perfect details provide clues to the fact they were all generated using artificial intelligence. The photos, which have not been linked to the Trump campaign, emerged as Trump seeks to win over Black voters who polls show remain loyal to President Joe Biden.

The fabricated images, highlighted in a recent BBC investigation, provide further evidence to support warnings that the use of AI-generated imagery will only increase as the November general election approaches. Experts said they highlight the danger that any group — Latinos, women, older male voters — could be targeted with lifelike images meant to mislead and confuse as well as demonstrate the need for regulation around the technology.

In a report published this week, researchers at the nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate used several popular AI programs to show how easy it is to create realistic deepfakes that can fool voters. The researchers were able to generate images of Trump meeting with Russian operatives, Biden stuffing a ballot box and armed militia members at polling places, even though many of these AI programs say they have rules to prohibit this kind of content.

The center analyzed some of the recent deepfakes of Trump and Black voters and determined that at least one was originally created as satire but was now being shared by Trump supporters as evidence of his support among Blacks.

Social media platforms and AI companies must do more to protect users from AI’s harmful effects, said Imran Ahmed, the center’s CEO and founder.

“If a picture is worth a thousand words, then these dangerously susceptible image generators, coupled with the dismal content moderation efforts of mainstream social media, represent as powerful a tool for bad actors to mislead voters as we’ve ever seen,” Ahmed said. “This is a wake-up call for AI companies, social media platforms and lawmakers – act now or put American democracy at risk.”

The images prompted alarm on both the right and left that they could mislead people about the former president’s support among African Americans. Some in Trump’s orbit have expressed frustration at the circulation of the fake images, believing that the manufactured scenes undermine Republican outreach to Black voters.

“If you see a photo of Trump with Black folks and you don’t see it posted on an official campaign or surrogate page, it didn’t happen,” said Diante Johnson, president of the Black Conservative Federation. “It’s nonsensical to think that the Trump campaign would have to use AI to show his Black support.”

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Experts expect additional efforts to use AI-generated deepfakes to target specific voter blocs in key swing states, such as Latinos, women, Asian Americans and older conservatives, or any other demographic that a campaign hopes to attract, mislead or frighten. With dozens of countries holding elections this year, the challenges posed by deepfakes are a global issue.

In January, voters in New Hampshire received a robocall that mimicked Biden’s voice telling them, falsely, that if they cast a ballot in that state’s primary they would be ineligible to vote in the general election. A political consultant later acknowledged creating the robocall, which may be the first known attempt to use AI to interfere with a U.S. election.

Such content can have a corrosive effect even when it’s not believed, according to a February study by researchers at Stanford University examining the potential impacts of AI on Black communities. When people realize they can’t trust images they see online, they may start to discount legitimate sources of information.

“As AI-generated content becomes more prevalent and difficult to distinguish from human-generated content, individuals may become more skeptical and distrustful of the information they receive,” the researchers wrote.

Even if it doesn’t succeed in fooling a large number of voters, AI-generated content about voting, candidates and elections can make it harder for anyone to distinguish fact from fiction, causing them to discount legitimate sources of information and fueling a loss of trust that’s undermining faith in democracy while widening political polarization.

While false claims about candidates and elections are nothing new, AI makes it faster, cheaper and easier than ever to craft lifelike images, video and audio. When released onto social media platforms like TikTok, Facebook or X, AI deepfakes can reach millions before tech companies, government officials or legitimate news outlets are even aware of their existence.

“AI simply accelerated and pressed fast forward on misinformation,” said Joe Paul, a business executive and advocate who has worked to increase digital access among communities of color. Paul noted that Black communities often have “this history of mistrust” with major institutions, including in politics and media, that both make Black communities more skeptical of public narratives about them as well as fact-checking meant to inform the community.

Digital literacy and critical thinking skills are one defense against AI-generated misinformation, Paul said. “The goal is to empower folks to critically evaluate the information that they encounter online. The ability to think critically is a lost art among all communities, not just Black communities.”

By STEVE PEOPLES and MICHELLE L. PRICE (Associated Press)

HOUSTON (AP) — The Republican National Committee voted Friday to install Donald Trump’s handpicked leadership team, completing his takeover of the national party as the former president closes in on a third straight presidential nomination.

Michael Whatley, a North Carolina Republican who has echoed Trump’s false theories of voter fraud, was elected the party’s new national chairman in a vote Friday morning in Houston. Lara Trump, the former president’s daughter-in-law, was voted in as co-chair.

Trump’s team is promising not to use the RNC to pay his mounting personal legal bills. But Trump and his lieutenants will have firm control of the party’s political and fundraising machinery with limited, if any, internal pushback.

“The RNC is going to be the vanguard of a movement that will work tirelessly every single day to elect our nominee, Donald J. Trump, as the 47th President of the United States,” Whatley told RNC members in a speech after being elected.

Whatley will carry the top title, replacing longtime chair Ronna McDaniel after she fell out of favor with key figures in the former president’s “Make America Great Again” movement. But he will be surrounded by people closer to Trump.

Lara Trump is expected to focus largely on fundraising and media appearances.

She emphasized that shortly after she was voted in, taking time in her inaugural speech as co-chair to hold up a check for a $100,000 that she said had been contributed that day to the party. When asked by a reporter later, she declined to say who wrote the check.

The functional head of the RNC will be Chris LaCivita, who will assume the committee’s chief of staff role while maintaining his job as one of the Trump campaign’s top two advisers.

McDaniel was handpicked by Trump to lead the committee seven years ago but was forced out after Trump’s MAGA movement increasingly blamed her for losses over the last few years. She alluded to that in her goodbye speech Friday, telling the members that she worries most about “internal cohesion” heading into the election.

“We have to stop the attacking other Republicans,” she said. “If we spend our time attacking each other, we guarantee the Democrats are going to win.”

She also told the party that it needs to engage independent and swing voters, warning: “We don’t win if we only talk to each other.”

While McDaniel got a standing ovation after her goodbye, the new leadership eagerly embraced the change, and Lara Trump, accompanied by her husband, Eric Trump, was greeted like a celebrity, with members lining up to take photos with her.

With Trump’s blessing, LaCivita is promising to enact sweeping changes and staffing moves at every level of the RNC to ensure it runs seamlessly as an extension of the Trump campaign.

In an interview Thursday, LaCivita sought to tamp down concerns from some RNC members that the already cash-strapped committee would help pay Trump’s legal bills. Trump faces four criminal indictments and a total of 91 counts as well as a $355 million civil fraud judgment, which he is appealing. His affiliated Save America political action committee has spent $76 million over the last two years on lawyers.

People speculating about the RNC paying for legal bills, LaCivita said, do so “purely on the basis of trying to hurt donors.” Trump’s legal bills are instead being covered largely by Save America, a separate political entity.

“The fact of the matter is not a penny of the RNC’s money or, for that matter, the campaign’s money has gone or will go to pay legal fees,” he said.

The RNC was paying some of Trump’s legal bills for New York cases that started while he was president, T he Washington Post reported, but McDaniel said in November 2022 that the RNC would stop paying once Trump became a candidate again and joined the 2024 presidential race.

When Trump announced his plans to replace the party’s leadership, it raised fresh questions about whether the committee would pay his bills. Those questions intensified after Lara Trump said last month that she wasn’t familiar with the party’s rules about paying her father-in-law’s legal fees, but she thought the idea would get broad support among Republican voters.

Facing such mixed messages, some RNC members remain skeptical.

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Republican committeeman Henry Barbour, of Mississippi, proposed a non-binding resolution explicitly stating that RNC funds could not be used for Trump’s legal bills. Yet the resolution died when Barbour failed to earn the support of RNC members from at least 10 states.

“People I’ve talked to on the committee privately all agree that donor money needs to be devoted to winning elections, not legal fees,” said Republican committeeman John Hammond, of Indiana. “I’m sure the committee would be glad to have some more assurance about that and clarification.”

The new leadership team is also expectedly to more fully embrace Trump’s focus on voter fraud and his debunked claims about the election he lost to President Joe Biden. Multiple court cases and Trump’s own Justice Department failed to reveal any evidence of significant voting irregularities.

Whatley, an attorney, has largely avoided using Trump’s characterization of Biden’s victory and said in one 2021 interview that Biden “absolutely” was legitimately elected and won the majority of the electoral college votes. But he said in another interview in the weeks after the 2020 election that there was “massive fraud.” He has also made focusing on “election integrity” a top priority for his state party in the years since.

In a letter announcing her candidacy for co-chair, Lara Trump wrote to members of the committee telling them she intends to focus on battleground states, getting out the vote in close races, to comb through the RNC’s finances, including all of its contracts and agreements and cut spending “that doesn’t directly go to winning elections.”

A key priority, she wrote, is working to ensure that the election is secure, something her father-in-law has made a chief focus.

In her speech Friday, Lara Trump declared: “I’m ready to get to work.”

“The goal on Nov. 5 is to win, as my father-in-law says, ‘bigly,’” she said.

In some ways, Trump’s GOP takeover represents a typical transition for major political parties when they shift from the primary to the general election phase of presidential elections. Candidates are typically given the keys to their national parties once they secure the presidential nomination. Biden, for example, effectively controls the Democratic National Committee.

Yet some privately worry that Trump is creating unnecessary drama and distraction for the party.

McDaniel is being replaced on Friday after Trump pressured her to resign. She was Trump’s hand-picked choice back in 2017. And he supported her reelection every two years as recently as last year.

But McDaniel increasingly drew the ire of MAGA leaders who blamed her for Republican losses in recent years. Other Republicans have blamed Trump, who remains broadly unpopular with Americans and vulnerable in particular with suburban and college-educated voters. Fifty-eight percent of U.S. adults said they would be dissatisfied if Trump were nominated for president, according to an AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs poll published in December.