The founder of a pro-Trump news outlet said “an internal investigation will be needed” to determine whether the network’s guests were tricked into speaking with an AI rather than the genuine former president Donald Trump.
On Thursday, Real America’s Voice aired the audio-only conversation with hosts John Solomon and Amanda Head.
It featured “Trump” reiterating tried-and-true talking lines, like accusing President Joe Biden of corruption and calling the legal proceedings against him a “whole big conspiracy.”
However, there are frequent audio pauses and the voice has a glitchy appearance.
Many commenters instantly voiced suspicion on Rumble, the video platform where the entire interview is still accessible.
Doesn’t seem like my President, one wrote. Not at all like Trump, that. He speaks erratically. It’s not in cadence. Dialect is incorrect. Another person remarked that the tone was wrong.
Someone else commented: “His cadence is off, it sounds like AI.”
Robert J. Sigg, the network’s founder, concurred. When contacted, he responded that it sounds “like ChatGOP,” an ironic reference to the OpenAI chatbot ChatGPT. The network, he continued, needs to look into if the interview was genuine.
Solomon stated that the interview was genuine and claimed to have coordinated it with Trump’s team. Over the years, Trump has conducted many sincere phone interviews and increasingly favors smaller publications who support him without question.
Solomon claimed that he planned out themes with Trump’s team and phoned them at the “right” time.
You may phone the staff and confirm for yourself. It was President Trump, not AI, he said. There is no denying that it was President Trump.
Reporters issued a comment request after business hours, but a Trump spokesman did not react right away. As of early Friday, it appeared that no Trump team members had made any public remarks on the validity of the interview.
The former president’s account did share a brief clip on Truth Social, though.
A right-leaning streaming, cable, and satellite station called Real America’s Voice has promoted conspiracy theories from QAnon and made inaccurate claims about widespread election fraud in 2020.
There are several artificial intelligence (AI) Trump impersonators online, and his voice has been digitally simulated before.
In July, a super PAC backing Gov. Ron DeSantis’ bid for president told that it had employed “technology” to impersonate the former president’s voice in an advertisement and give voice to statements he had made on the website Truth Social.
Out-of-hours requests for comment from Real America’s Voice and Performance One Media LLC representatives were not immediately fulfilled.
