AI chatbots are terrible fact-checkers.
Photos of Greg Bovino, the Border Patrol chief who’s become the face of President Donald Trump’s deportation campaign, have gone viral recently because Bovino’s fashion choices make him look like an old school Nazi. But don’t bother asking AI chatbots about the photos. Elon Musk’s Grok thinks that Bovino is a famous female artist dressed up in garish makeup.
The photos of Bovino were taken almost a month ago for CNN and the photographer shared the images on Instagram a few weeks back. If you know anything about history, Bovino is sporting a disturbing look. Especially when you remember this is the guy who’s waging a racist campaign in U.S. cities to purge the country of immigrants. His haircut isn’t helping either.
Many people who have seen the photos of Bovino on social media can’t believe they’re real. And some people have turned to generative AI in an effort to determine whether the images are authentic. One person on X asked Grok, which told the user it appeared to be an AI-generated image. So I tried it out for myself, uploading the same black-and-white photo to Grok.
Grok described the photo as featuring a person “dressed in an elaborate, military-style uniform.” The person was described as having “distinctive makeup and hairstyle,” which Grok said gives it a “dramatic, almost theatrical appearance.” And the AI bot describes the style of as “reminiscent of high-fashion editorial photography or performance art.”
I asked Grok whether the photo was real, and the chatbot replied that it was. But it responded with a rather amusing assertion of who was depicted in the image.
This image is a well-known work by Cindy Sherman, a renowned conceptual photographer. It’s from her “Untitled #474” (2008) series, where she dresses as various characters to explore identity, performance, and societal roles.
