The former president — DJing in Arizona?
A social media post led millions to mistakenly believe the former commander-in-chief was spinning records.
Images seemingly showing former President Barack Obama DJing in Arizona garnered over 1.1 million views on TikTok and 4 million on Instagram.
The catch? It never happened. It was all artificial intelligence.
Photo courtesy of Alexander Peet
What they’re saying:
“I posted it, and it pretty much went viral overnight,” said event photographer Alexander Peet.
The idea came to Peet while he was experimenting with a new AI editing tool. He used photos of DJ Dillon Francis at the Goldrush Music Festival at Chandler’s Rawhide Western Town and added his own little spin.
“I put his picture in and said take out the tattoos, replace his face with Obama, and it did it in one shot like that,” Peet said. It showed the former president trading the Oval Office for a turntable.
In a move Peet labeled “meme marketing,” he dropped the photos on his professional Instagram page, “The Lens of Peet.” The caption hinted at the true nature of the image: “Crazy how much Obama looks like Dillon Francis at Goldrush here.”
“It was purely just a stunt—just a one-off stunt to see where it could go, and I just planned to keep it like that,” Peet said.
But the image soon took on a life of its own, with some news stations appearing to have fallen for the bait. By the afternoon of Thursday, Oct. 2, the Instagram post had nearly a quarter million likes.
Photo courtesy of Alexander Peet
Dig deeper:
“It’s very difficult to determine whether an image is fake or not,” said Asheley Landrum, a professor of media psychology at Arizona State University (ASU).
She warns that these kinds of AI images aren’t going anywhere soon, which is why developing skills to spot them is so important.
“When I teach media literacy, we talk about SIFT: So stop, investigate the source, find better coverage, and trace the media back to its original context,” Landrum explained.
As for Peet, he’s stunned over how it all got mixed up.
“Even Instagram itself labeled it as AI, and it hints at it in the captions, so I didn’t want it to be like I was the purveyor of fake news or spreading misinformation or anything like that, but it really comes to show how far AI has come in such little time,” Peet said.
Professor Landrum also stresses using skills like looking for anatomical anomalies — like extra fingers or weird hand positionings, and glassy eyes as dead giveaways.
Photo courtesy of Alexander Peet
