Donald Trump’s head lump was an AI creation.
Speculation about Donald Trump’s declining health was running rampant on social media over the holiday weekend as Americans wondered whether the president was actually on his deathbed. Some people even turned to AI tools in an effort to get a better look at grainy photos of Trump, who seemed to only be captured in blurry images like Bigfoot in the wild.
But using AI like that is a complete waste of time. The AI only confused people because these “enhancements” can’t actually give you a more honest picture of a grainy photo. AI just adds bullshit that wasn’t there to begin with.
Patient zero for the AI-induced nonsense about Trump this weekend appeared to be a Bluesky user named Christopher Webb. The online sleuth wrote, “Today’s press pool photo shows Trump leaving the White House this morning,” while sharing a grainy photo from .
“I enhanced the image. And seriously, can an expert explain what the hell is happening to his forehead? Right above his nose and right brow,” Webb continued, watermarking the image in the lower-right corner.
And that AI-augmented image rippled around the entire English-speaking internet.Grok told me it’s real
It did look weird. The AI-altered photo showed what appeared to be a large mass on Trump’s forehead, causing people to insist that he had a stroke. Others came up with even more specific diagnoses, calling it a “decompressive hemicraniectomy,” in a screenshot on X that also appeared to rely on generative AI for information.
The AI image jumped from Bluesky to just about every other social media platform on the internet, including X, Threads, Instagram, and TikTok.
Users on X asked Grok, as they so often do, to check if the photo was legit. Grok insisted the photo was real “with no obvious signs of photoshopping.”
Grok, of course, often gets things wrong, even when it’s not being intentionally manipulated by its billionaire owner, Elon Musk, to spit out far-right talking points. Musk, as you may recall, gave two Nazi-style salutes back in January and tinkered with Grok in ways that made it praise Hitler and spread conspiracy theories about white farmers being killed in South Africa.
But that massive lump on Trump’s forehead isn’t real. It was added by AI because applying tools that “upscale” an image doesn’t actually bring you closer to the truth. It simply brings you closer to an image that looks sharper and less pixelated. And these tools will take things like shadows or innocuous creases in a person’s face and make it appear as if there’s something there when there isn’t.Check the flag
Maybe the best way to understand what’s happening is to look at the flags on Trump’s hat in the original photo and the AI-enhanced image. What do you notice?
Yep, the AI image didn’t create a better version of reality.
