The Department of Transportation is doing a docuseries
Plus: Trump doesn’t have any ex-presidents on his side. Does he need one?
Hello, in this issue we’ll look at…
Trump doesn’t have any ex-presidents on his side. Does he need one?
Can you tell an A.I.-generated image from a real one?
The DOT is doing a docuseries
Scroll to the end to see: whether you can tell an A.I.-generated images from a real one 👾
Trump doesn’t have any ex-presidents on his side. Does he need one?
Democrats are planning what could be the most lucrative fundraiser in party history by taking advantage of one thing former President Donald Trump doesn’t have: any other former presidents in his corner.
Later this month, President Joe Biden will appear with former Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton for a first-of-its kind fundraiser at Radio City Music Hall. Tickets start at $250, but a pic with the three POTUSes sets you back $100,000 and an exclusive reception with Biden, Obama, and Clinton costs more. Stephen Colbert will be there and it’s expected to raise more than more than $10 million, according to NBC News,
The idea is the brainchild of Democratic mega donor and Milwaukee Bucks owner Marc Lasry and his son Alex, per NBC News (Lasry once hosted a fundraiser in 2012 with Obama and Clinton), but it’s really a no-brainer. Ex-presidents are a draw for big- and small-dollar donors alike, and out of office, they usually see their popularity grow. Ironically, getting away from politics can be a political asset.
Since Republicans only have two living former presidents and they’re not chummy enough to appear together in fundraising ads, Trump is at a disadvantage. Still, he reaps at least some of the benefits of the post-presidency. Trump might not be able to co-headline a $10 million fundraiser with W., but his image has softened. Call it “collective amnesia.”
Trump’s retrospective job approval was 46% in June, up from 34% when he left office, and in his Super Tuesday election night speech, Trump encouraged an overly positive recollection of his presidency.
“Every single group was doing better than ever before and it was a beautiful thing, our country was coming together,” he said of his time in office, as if 2020 never happened and he just gets a mulligan for his handling of the deadliest event in U.S. history and its accompanying fallout.
Can you tell A.I.-generated images from real ones?
To test whether you can tell the difference between real and artificially generated images of people, two professors at the University of Washington made Which Face is Real. The site shows two headshots at a time, one real and one fake, and asks you to pick the real one.
The real images are drawn from FFHQ, a dataset of 70,000 high-quality photos of human faces that were published with Creative Commons, public domain, or U.S. government works licenses. The A.I. ones come from thispersondoesnotexist dot com.
Since these photos are all headshots, you usually won’t have any obviously A.I.-generated fingers or lettering to spot. Instead, watch out for weird inconsistencies in skin texture and pay careful attention to teeth (but also remember that not every culture is as obsessed with orthodontia as the U.S.). Make sure the hair looks realistic. Oftentimes, an unnatural-looking or inconsistent background is the biggest tell.
Some rounds are easier than others, but inevitably you’ll get one wrong. A.I. can generate pictures of fake humans that look so real you’d think they could select all images of a crosswalk, and if there are none click next. It’s got real people real nervous about how false images could spread ahead of the election.
The BBC reported this week how some Trump supporters have shared A.I.-generated images of Trump with Black voters. An image of Trump sitting on a porch with a group of Black men was posted first by an Instagram account called “trump_history45” that shares ahistorical faked photos of Trump that are mostly but not always obvious. The image has since been deleted or archived, but it later went viral with a caption falsely claiming Trump had pulled his motorcade over to snap the pic.
In Florida, a conservative radio host named Mark Kaye shared an A.I.-generated image to Facebook his team made of Trump smiling with his arms around two Black women. The image was attached to an article about Black voters supporting Trump. Kaye, who has one million followers, told the BBC he didn’t claim it was real and “if anybody's voting one way or another because of one photo they see on a Facebook page, that's a problem with that person, not with the post itself.”
Ben Nimmo, former Meta global lead for threat intelligence, said the ease of creating faked images means social media users with large followings need to be prepared to vet what they share.
“Anybody who has a substantial audience in 2024 needs to start thinking, how do I vet anything which gets sent to me? How do I make sure that I don't unwittingly become part of some kind of foreign influence operation?”
The DOT is doing a docuseries
Transportation Secretary Mayor Pete Buttigieg is also a YouTuber.
Buttigieg appears in the first episode of a new Department of Transportation YouTube series called “Investing In America” that aims to sell the benefits of Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. Episode one is about what else but a bridge in the Midwest.
The video includes interviews with the mayors of Duluth, Minn., and Superior, Wisc., about their shared Blatnik Bridge. Deteriorating, the bridge could have closed by 2030, but the DOT awarded $1 billion in federal grants in January from the infrastructure legislation to rebuild it.
Viewers are introduced to an ironworker working on the bridge and a local business owner who lives in Duluth, works in Superior, and wrote Buttigieg asking for the DOT to consider the project. The flared serif used to write out “The Twin Ports” and other location text in the video is Fort Foundry’s Gin.
“Where Duluth and Superior meet represents a key transportation hub in the Great Lakes region where all of the important pieces come together,” Buttigieg says in the video. “We’re talking about trains, trucks, we’re talking about people’s commutes, and we’re talking about the ships and barges that get things to where they need to be.”
Buttigieg’s two immediate predecessors didn’t post on YouTube during their short acting tenures (they were only there for a few weeks after former Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao resigned following the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol). Chao used it mostly to post video statements for annual commemorations, like National Truck Driver Appreciation Week, Pedestrian Safety Month, and the second anniversary of then-first lady Melania Trump’s “Be Best” initiative.
Buttigieg has appeared in videos like that too for Veterans Day and Pride, but the DOT’s YouTube account has also posted videos of Buttigieg on trips to places where grant money is being put to work, like a municipal airport in South Dakota and the Port of Alaska.
The DOT’s YouTube channel is better produced and more engaging now than it was during the Trump administration, but there’s also more material to work with because of the Biden administration’s infrastructure investments. But a Mr. Beast Buttigieg is not.
While the DOT’s production value has gone up, most of these videos only have a few hundred views each. Episode one of “Investing In America” isn’t doing too bad, though. On its first day it reached 8,200 views. For a federal agency YouTube page, that’s a hit.
Have you seen this?
Is the price of glam “the biggest hurdle to developing female artists”? "Crippling" costs, thorny relationships, and shifting power balances make hair, nails, and makeup decisions far more than skin deep. [Billboard]
From Louis Vuitton to Gap, the Black cowboy is fashion’s latest muse. Hold your horses. 2024 is gearing up to be the year Black cowboy style hits the mainstream. [Fast Company]
Can you tell A.I.-generated images from real ones? The correct answer is the one on the right.
🔒 They’re all running on their records, so here’s how California Democrats are differentiating. The three leading Democratic candidates in the race are all playing up their records in office in paid advertising, but each took a different approaches to what that looks like. [Yello]
History of political design
Margaret Chase Smith for President button (1964). A moderate from Maine, Smith became the first woman in U.S. history to serve in both the House and Senate. Smith was the first Republican senator to condemn Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s “Red Scare” anti-communist witch hunts, and in 1964 she was the first female candidate to be placed in nomination for the presidency at a major political party convention. It would be another 60 years before former Ambassador Nikki Haley became the first female Republican candidate to win a primary, following her win in Washington, D.C., on Sunday.
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