New Search

Trace the Information: Did Kamala Harris dress up in a communist uniform?

SKILL: Trace the Information

DIFFICULTY: Simple

SUBJECT(S): Politics/Current Events, AI

Students will do a keyword search to learn that an image of Kamala Harris that was shared by Elon Musk is AI generated.

Related Lesson

CTRL-F Lesson 4: Trace the Information (sign-in required)

Link to Example

Elon Musk tweet (X)
AI generated image of Kamala Harris wearing a communist uniform. Text on image says "AI GENERATED IMAGE."

Background

Leading up to the 2024 US presidential election, post have circulated accusing American Democratic candidate Kamala Harris of belonging to the Communist party. 

Communism is a political and economic ideology in which wealth and property are communally owned and distributed equally among citizens according to their needs. 

There are now numerous artificial intelligence (AI) programs online, such as Midjourney, that people can use to create images that look shockingly photorealistic. The AI program is trained on a data-set of thousands of images and uses it to produce new images. The person using the AI art generator can use text to describe what image they want the AI to produce.



About the Example

If you cannot access X, click here for a screenshot of post that you can share with your students.

This post, shared by Elon Musk on X (formerly Twitter), shows a picture of Kamala Harris wearing a red Communist uniform and a hat bearing the communist symbol of the hammer and sickle. 

At first glance, the image does appear to be generated by Artificial Intelligence (AI). However, it is impossible to tell for certain if an image is fake just by looking at it. We’ll have to do a search to see what we can find.

There are two ways to do this: a reverse-image search and a keyword search. Our reverse-image search doesn’t yield any high quality coverage so let’s use a keyword search to find more context about this image.

By searching words that summarize the claim and image (“Elon Musk Kamala Harris Communist”), we find numerous articles from various new sources like The Independent and CNN that confirm this image is AI-generated and Kamala Harris did not dress up in a communist uniform..



Activities

  1. Show students this post and have them summarize the claim. 
  2. Have students do a keyword search using relevant terms like ‘Elon Musk Kamala Harris Communist’. This will bring up several articles from reputable news sources like The Independent and CNN.
  3. Have students click on the professional news coverage to learn that the image was AI generated.


Related Resources