Jacksonville-based radio host “fired” and causes stir sharing AI generated photo of Trump with Black voters

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – Jacksonville-based radio host Mark Kaye has parted ways with Cox Media Group (parent company of WOKV Radio) as he deals with international headlines that he created and shared an AI generated photo of Donald Trump surrounded by Black voters.

News4Jax was contacted by Cox Media and has learned that Kaye’s separation from the company was prior to him being connected to the AI photo of Trump.

One way to determine if an image is real or not is by looking at the hands and fingers of a person in the photo. Look at the perfect lighting on all the faces in what appears to be a party setting.

Daniel Cronrath, who teaches political science at Florida State College of Jacksonville, said there is an effort from Republicans and Democrats to attract the African-American vote.

“There are polls where a record number of African-Americans are responding to pollsters that they’re intrested in supporting President Trump. Does President Biden still hold the advantage? Yes,” Conrath said.

News4JAX reached out to Kaye for a statement and he gave no comments, but he said to the BBC, “I’m not a photojournalist...I’m not out here taking pictures of what’s really happening. I’m a storyteller.”

“I’m not claiming it is accurate,” Kaye continued. “I’m not saying, ‘Hey, look, Donald Trump was at this party with all of these African American voters. Look how much they love him!’ If anybody’s voting one way or another because of one photo they see on a Facebook page, that’s a problem with that person, not with the post itself.”

Kaye made this post on X:

Chris Hamer is a cyber security expert and he said there are websites like www.isitai.com where you can run images to determine if an image is fake.

Hamer ran the picture that was shared by Kaye through the site and it reported that the picture is 98.91% AI.

“There’s a number of websites that allow you to upload an image and it will analyze not only the capacity to generate the image but also some other tricks to photographic editing,” Hamer said.

A local official that’s part of a Department of Homeland security Task Force on election integrity said one of their biggest concers this election cycle is AI generated content that can deceive voters.

Hamer added that one primary goal of AI is to make photos exactly identical to real ones. An untrained eye can spot some things that appear to have been altered but in the future, technology may eliminate that.