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Are We Not Entertained?
Trump and Musk fans tell themselves a powerful story — what about the rest of us?
An image of Elon Musk sleeping on the floor in Washington D.C. recently made the rounds. He’s wrapped in an American-flag sleeping bag. A Facebook user claimed the image was proof of Musk working tirelessly to fix our “broken bureaucracy.” That it was a sign of his work ethic. He’s a “workaholic like Trump” — they both care so much about democracy they can’t sleep.
Here’s the thing.
The image is AI.
It’s so AI, there are six-pointed stars on the sleeping bag. Musk’s face looks wrong; pinched and contorted. “Grok” was stamped in the lower right corner.
I left the post on Facebook, but not before treating myself to some of the comments, the top ones all praising Musk and Trump. It wasn’t until the fourth most popular comment that someone had pointed out the AI, but replies to that comment were full of dissent.
Either it wasn’t AI, people said, and someone had tampered with the image to make it look AI. Or it was AI, admittedly, but it was emblematic of what Musk is, in fact, like.
Fake or not, the image was truth.
Images tell stories. Images are information. And as historian Yuval Noah Harari…
