Bet it all on creating Deep Fakes of Joe Biden.

That, seriously, is what Kaivan Shroff--a former Clinton campaign staffer--suggested the Democrats do in an opinion piece for the Huffington Post. 

Opinion: It’s Time for the Biden Campaign to Embrace AI https://t.co/qk6Wa421xY

— HuffPost (@HuffPost) July 3, 2024

There's nothing especially bold or audacious about his plan, but for the fact that he says it out loud and expects the technology to be up to the task. 

After all, Deep Fakes are essentially hoaxes, and hoaxes are all the Democrats have had to get Biden elected in the first place and to keep him in office for nearly four years. Why not try Hoax 3.0? Hoax 10.1? I have no idea what version of hoax we are on now because they are almost countless, but you get the point. 

The stakes of the 2024 presidential election cannot be overstated. With Donald Trump promising to act as a dictator “on day one,” it is not hyperbolic to say the future of American democracy hangs in the balance. Against this backdrop, the Biden campaign faces a critical challenge: conveying a strong and effective image of President Joe Biden to a population and media ecosystem increasingly focused on optics over substance. Given the president’s concerning performance last week, it’s time for the Biden campaign to consider leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) to effectively reach the voting public.

While of course there are reasonable hesitations to break this dam on the use of modern technology in presidential campaigning, the consequences of not taking this approach could be dire. Moreover, in the currently under-regulated electoral landscape, refusing to use modern tools like AI is akin to entering the boxing ring with one hand tied behind your back.

There are a few kinks to work out, of course, such as AI's tendency to add extra fingers to figures, but at least with Biden, you wouldn't have the problem of the so-called "uncanny valley," where human beings get repelled by things that look eerily human but not quite 100%. Biden is already in that uncanny valley, looking very much like an animated corpse. 

As Olivia Nuzzi put it in her New York magazine piece I wrote about earlier,

Up close, the president does not look quite plausible. It’s not that he’s old. We all know what old looks like. Bernie Sanders is old. Mitch McConnell is old. Most of the ruling class is old. The president was something stranger, something not of this earth.

This was true even in 2020. His face had then an uncanny valley quality that injectable aficionados call “low trust” — if only by millimeters, his cosmetically altered proportions knocked his overall facial harmony into the realm of the improbable. His thin skin, long a figurative problem and now a literal one, was pulled tightly over cheeks that seemed to vary month to month in volume. Under artificial light and in the sunshine, he took on an unnatural gleam. He looked, well, inflated. His eyes were half-shut or open very wide.

In a sense, then, we already have an A.I. president. The body is simply a meat puppet into which the appropriate words are input, hopefully, to come out unmangled. 

It never quite works, does it? How many of us are fooled by the Deep Fakes? Only "cheap fakes"--real videos that haven't been edited but can somehow be "debunked" while being 100% real--somehow get believed despite Karine Jean-Pierre and the MSM claiming them to be inventions. 

As with all A.I. these days, the Biden Hoax 10.1 mangles the words, looks unrealistic, and invents an alternate "truth" that can't bear scrutiny if any is applied. AI will invent sources, create fake legal precedents, and produce images that bear little resemblance to reality if examined. If lawyers will submit AI generated briefs that collapse under the lightest examination, it isn't too much to assume that the Biden White House will try the same thing, I suppose. 

Hey, that sounds like Joe Biden already, come to think about it. Uncanny valley. Invents facts. Spews total bulls**t. Can't bear scrutiny. They are already using this strategy!

That a half-wit political consultant would write such a piece shouldn't surprise us. After all, he is probably just trying to get attention with an outlandish idea that he thought up after a long night partying with Hunter Biden before the drugs wore off. 

But that Huffington Post is willing to publish this shows how desperate everybody is to find SOME solution to the problem that Biden doesn't want to leave and the Democrats need him to go. "Cheap fakes" didn't work. Now it is time for the "Deep fakes." 

Yeah, that'll work. 

That their solution is to try YET ANOTHER hoax is, at least, very on-brand.