I BEGAN WRITING this after I saw the photos of Donald Trump working at McDonald’s. Like many, I was struck by how much the images, with their bizarre aesthetics and surreal content, looked like they had been generated by artificial intelligence: “Donald Trump working at McDonald’s” is the sort of generically absurd scenario one might blurt out when asked for a ChatGPT prompt. But once I saw several blue-checkmarked news organizations post the photos on social media, I grew confident that the former president had, in fact, been frying french fries in suburban Philadelphia. The campaign stunt dominated the day’s discourse. Its images slid backward into the uncanny valley and flooded it.
What was strange was that, even once I knew the photos were taken in the world with a camera, they still felt AI-generated to me. They were still charged with the fundamental quality that can make AI images unsettling: a realness untethered from reality; vivid signification without a vivid referent.