Blog: What Was with the Trump AI Picture?

I’ve been slow on catching up with the news recently, but apparently a few weeks ago, Trump posted a now viral AI picture of himself as Jesus healing someone and the internet lost its mind. Part of this was a reasonable response since the picture is, by all accounts, blasphemous. Even if it was meant as a joke, people – no matter who they are – shouldn’t be trying to raise themselves to the level of Jesus. You’re not God. Deal with it.

But the part that I mainly want to focus on is the outrage and theories floating around about the weird figure in the background. For those of you who have only seen the edited version of the picture Trump posted, the one Trump posted had a weird figure in the background that looked demonic. It was later changed to be another soldier, but in Trump’s, it looked like a humanoid figure with sunrays coming out of its head with its arms raised.

Naturally, because of how the figure in the background looked, many Christians started freaking out and talking about the potential implications of it being there. People have started coming up with conspiracy theories about it, saying that Trump changed it to include the demon since the supposed original (the one that others say is edited) didn’t have the demon there. Some are even saying that it’s Trump silently saying that he’s been sent by Baal.

Now, I don’t know how much of this is true. If it’s true that the original came from someone else and didn’t have the demonic figure in the background, then I do wonder how that got there. If the picture where the demonic figure isn’t present is the edited version, then I heavily suspect that the demonic figure was an AI glitch.

For those of you who have never used AI to generate images before, most of the time, the AI will misunderstand your prompts and mix up random things. I did a post about this a while back, but even with the better AI apps like Grok (before it put image generation behind a paywall), you’ll still run into the issue of it mixing thing up. For example, a little while ago, I asked Grok to generate a picture of a character I created, who had bird wings. Similar to my experiences with giving Copilot similar prompts, it put a literal bird on my character’s back.

Another instance of AI confusion was when I was trying to use AI to generate a picture of me debating a Muslim. At one point during my repeated attempts to generate a decent thumbnail, it put a hijab-like veil on my character along with the tanuki ears. It also put my character in a kimono for some reason during another attempt to generate a good thumbnail.

Because of AI’s tendency to get things wrong, I don’t think that we should be freaking out as much about the demonic looking thing in the background. And heck, while there’s good reason to be offended at the rest of the picture itself, I think that the main issue is that we need to stop pretending that Trump is a Christian. I think one of the biggest reasons why this came as such a shock to so many people is because many evangelicals think Trump is an exemplar of Christianity and Christian values. It’s time to accept that he is not a Christian and to stop acting like he is.

Until next time,

M.J.