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Its soundtrack was an #AI generated, clubby song w/lyrics such as “Trump Gaza shining bright, golden future, a brand new light.” Earlier in Feb, #Trump had threatened to “take over” #Gaza, forcibly relocate its population of 2 million, & turn it into the “Riviera of the Middle East.” The AI video made the #neocolonialist mission nauseatingly explicit.

#Trump’s sharing of the clip to his 9M followers on Truth Social, w/no acknowledgment of its source, suggested that he was claiming it as a rendering of his #policy plans. It immediately found a wider audience: headlines, including one from NPR, described the video as “Trump’s.” In fact, it is the work of 2 Israeli American filmmakers, Solo Avital & Ariel Vromen, who run an #AI-driven studio in Los Angeles….

#expansionism #imperialism #Gaza #geopolitics #USpol
https://www.npr.org/2025/02/26/nx-s1-5309695/trump-gaza-video

The pair created the clip in early Feb, in the course of 8 hours, as a way to test the capacities of the generative #AI software #ArcanaLabs, which is made by another LA-based company. The news of #Trump’s #Gaza statements had just broken &, Avital told the New Yorker on a recent video call, miming an expression of shock, “I couldn’t believe my ears & my eyes.” Avital grew up near #TelAviv but spent a lot of time near the Gaza border. “I always believed in the idea of coexistence.”

But Avital added that he’s felt alienated at times by liberal “cancel culture” & “wokeness” & thinks the left’s vision of a liberated #Palestine, so long as #Hamas remains in power, is as fantastical as #Trump’s plan for a #MiddleEast Riviera. “What if Trump really will take over #Gaza? I mean, it’s not such a bad thought. I’m not totally against it,” he said, but added, of #Palestinians, “I think it’s not realistic unless he includes them in it.” [smh]

Avital set out to make a video that depicted “giving the #Palestinians a Dubai-lavish life style”—#Trump’s #Gaza plan, minus the mass expulsion—while satirizing Trump’s self-aggrandizement. (“I have a touch for comedy.”) Stationed at his computer in LA, Avital created #AI models of Trump & #Musk, then generated one scene after another by feeding Arcana prompts: “Imagine if Trump Plaza was Trump Gaza”; “A Dubai-like beach with yachts & restaurants”; “Elon Musk in a restaurant eating hummus.”

He insisted the video was not meant to be callous. “I didn’t do it to make people look down at the #Palestinians,” he said. But perhaps his #Trump satire was not as pointed as he’d hoped. Avital sent the finished video to Vromen. The 2 passed it around among friends & family, then Vromen, who is an established filmmaker…, put it on his Instagram, where he has >100k followers. But Avital urged him to take it down, worrying that they might attract trouble for mocking Trump.

#Trump, who is not known to shy away from gold, or an effigy, seems instead to have found the video inspiring.
Avital & Vromen don’t know exactly how Trump obtained the clip, which had been on IG for only a few hours, but on the day Trump shared it, Avital’s phone lit up with a barrage of messages. In the time since, he has experienced online threats & hacking attempts, but that he was most bothered by the fact that Trump had shared the video w/o any context.

“You give the public the ability to kidnap it & abduct it into their own narrative,” Avital said. What was made as a quickie experiment has become one of the most consequential #AI-generated videos to date, …serving as a piece of internet-native political #propaganda.

#Trump’s misleading #appropriation of the video was just the latest example of the new admin turning #digital #content, produced in-house or found online, into a form of #MAGA #agitprop.