A full-blown war between the BJP and the Congress party with AI-generated content as weapons has broken out on social media.
It began with the popular trend of posting photos processed by ChatGPT that made them look as if they were taken with film cameras in the 1980s. The tool also tweaks the photos by adding or removing facial and other features to make people look the part, unlike a vanilla filter that only adds a colour effect. Soon, it caught the eye of political leaders including Union ministers from the BJP, Kiren Rijiju and Piyush Goyal, who became early adopters of the trend. “Why is everyone going back to the 80s vibes? Goyal, too, added a line with a smiley, “Vibing to the 80s trend. It did not take long, however, for the trend to become weaponised.
I’m also forced to 80s nostalgia,” Rijiju said in a post on X.
The Congress party in Kerala posted an AI-generated photo of a bald man in the front passenger seat of a Maruti Suzuki Omni with the caption, “A Gujarat street in the 80s. However, a poster on a wall by the side of the road had the words written in Hindi: “Please smile, you are in Delhi. Many comments on the Congress’s ’80s trend’ photo pointed out what they identified as an obvious subtext about the party’s rivals from Gujarat. The BJP’s counterattack came from its Telangana unit in the form of another AI-generated photo, which showed a woman in a red dress dancing on a table in a bar. The glass cabinets behind her held dozens of liquor bottles like in any regular bar. Four men and a woman watched her dance. In the descriptor of the woman’s photo which the BJP shared by reposting the Congress’s van post – both created using AI – the BJP wrote, “Lusiana, Italy. Circa-1970s. the post alluded to a town in Italy where Sonia Gandhi was born While it did not name anyone. Some of the typical features of the ChatGPT 1980s trend include colourful clothing, film grain effects, faded background elements and film camera look with date stamp.
The post also alluded to the many appearances in Bollywood of the workhorse van, first made by India’s largest carmaker in 1984, as the preferred transport of goons and villains, earning the meme-name “kidnapping van”.
