One of the least credible ways in which North Carolina Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson (R) attempted to dismiss Thursday’s report about wildly offensive comments he made on the message board of a pornographic site years ago was that it didn’t sound like him.
“This is not my voice,” he told CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski, whose team uncovered the comments. “These are not things that we would ever say or even think.”
The comments, Robinson referring to himself as a “black NAZI” foremost among them, are very much in keeping with his voice — at least, his voice before he became his party’s gubernatorial nominee. Robinson’s antisemitic comments are well documented; other prior reporting offered insights into his proclivity for adult entertainment. The CNN report, if anything, was simply tying threads together.
What’s more, the report was robust. CNN’s team not only uncovered the comments, published more than a decade ago on a site called “Nude Africa,” but showed how details from that and other sites tied Robinson to the account and to the username “minisoldr,” under which the comments were posted. It’s a digital trail that would be all-but-impossible to create artificially.
Yet that’s exactly what Robinson suggested had happened.
“I’m not going to get into the minutiae of how somebody manufactured these salacious tabloid lies,” he said. “But I can tell you this: There’s been over $1 million spent on me through AI by a billionaire’s son who’s bound and determined to destroy me. The things that people can do with the internet now is incredible. But what I can tell you is this, again, these are not my words.”
Kaczynski pushed back: Was he suggesting that someone had invented these comments and pinned them to Robinson?
“Look,” Robinson replied, “I have no idea how this was done.”
For years, the default response from politicians and public figures digitally linked to mistakes or scandals was to assert that they had been hacked. Former New York congressman Anthony Weiner sent a lewd photo to a young woman? Hack. A sports analyst posts an incorrect historical point? Hacked.
The appeal is obvious. Americans have seen lots of Hollywood movies in which hackers do surreal, miraculous things that hackers can’t or wouldn’t do in real life. Since digital mechanisms are often inscrutable, people are deferential to the idea that maybe some computer geek did that thing that the elected official alleges. And then, almost inevitably, it turns out that it was exactly what it seemed at the outset.
Now, as reflected in Robinson’s comments, there’s a new boogeyman: artificial intelligence. We have all seen the way in which AI can be used to generate startlingly realistic images and text; we know that major institutions are investing billions in amplifying the technology’s capabilities. Those capabilities are still more limited than the public’s imagination, in the same way that “hacking” has been misunderstood, meaning that AI is an appealing new vehicle for claims that a primarily digital scandal somehow stems from devious robot influence.
Before Robinson, there was Donald Trump, claiming that Democrats “used AI” in preparing videos for the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol or that a years-old photo of him was somehow perhaps generated through artificial intelligence. Trump has also claimed that Vice President Kamala Harris used AI to inflate the size of her crowds in photos, something that only someone strangely obsessed with crowd size might entertain.
Seeking to rebut the CNN reporting, Robinson took the same tack. It is true, as he notes, that he has been the target of AI-generated imagery from a wealthy opponent. But the use of artificial intelligence in that case isn’t to manufacture false assertions from Robinson. Instead, it’s to present written statements from the Republican candidate as spoken ones. This can be evaluated on its own ethical merits, but it isn’t really what Robinson is trying to suggest happened with the Nude Africa posts.
Robinson waves away questions about how this would work for the simple reason that it wouldn’t. It is perhaps possible that someone went into the Nude Africa database of past comments and inserted ones attributed to “minisoldr.” It’s possible that an AI could be trained on Robinson’s past comments, meaning they would use similar phrases as ones he used in public posts, as CNN documented. (Which, by the way, severely undercuts the idea that the posts were not in his voice.)
This isn’t as easy as it seems, given that the comments were part of ongoing interactions, including responses from other users. You’d have to create those, too, and inject them into the database — but then you’re making it relatively easy to validate those users and their digital trails. Oh, what a tangled web we weave when first we train an algorithm to deceive.
And all of this to what end? To put slightly more outrageous words in Robinson’s mouth? To tie him to a slightly more salacious community? It seems clear that one reason the CNN report was such a sensation was that there had been hours of hints that it was coming — hints that were centered around the North Carolina Republican Party’s obvious interest in finding a last-minute replacement for their already-trailing-badly candidate. This became a big thing in part, it seems, because some Republicans wanted it to be a big thing.
Others don’t. Over the past 72 hours, CNN mentioned Robinson’s name in more than 400 15-second blocks of airtime. MSNBC mentioned it in more than 200.
Fox News has mentioned it 12 times, including on Bret Baier’s news show. There, it was dismissed as an “October surprise” — suggesting that it was a campaign tactic — with Baier noting Robinson’s claim that those weren’t his words.
Baier, at least, did not blame a robot.