Visitors to the US Department of Housing and Urban Development's headquarters in the capital got some unpleasant viewing on Monday morning after TV screens across the building began showing a deepfake video of President Trump kissing and sucking Elon Musk's toes.
The AI-generated footage had been circulating online over the weekend on social media, but the video was displayed on monitors at HUD on Monday morning, along with the message: "Long live the real king."
(For those who don't know, that's a reference to Republican President Trump yelling on state social media the other day "long live the king," referring to himself as a monarch. Elon, meanwhile, was recruited by Trump to, under the DOGE project, run through federal organizations to cut programs, contracts, and thousands of staff the Tesla tycoon doesn't approve of, and thus has been likened by some as the real president of the United States, especially given this earlier baffling press conference in the Oval Office.)
HUD staff reportedly resorted to unplugging the screens after failing to get the video removed from sight, and the agency is investigating.
"Another waste of taxpayer dollars and resources," HUD spokesperson Kasey Lovett told The Register. "Appropriate action will be taken for all involved."
The video is a pretty bad deepfake - Musk has two left feet for example, something not seen outside of comedy classic Best In Show. We've asked HUD for an explanation of how the video was spammed out to appear on the monitors, and will update as more information comes in.
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Late Sunday, the SpaceX supremo shed some light on the alleged reasoning behind sending that demand, as push-back from officials grew and workers refused to participate or were ordered not to: Musk asked for the lists of accomplishments from millions of people because he wanted to see "who had a pulse and two working neurons." The billionaire seems to be under the impression fraudsters are collecting paychecks from the federal coffers for dead or ex-employees, and that some people aren't even checking their email.
Asking more than a million people, some handling sensitive subjects, to reply to an email about their past week might also be seen as not a particularly productive use of time.
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I'm not at all sure whether "two left feet" shows that the deepfake is poor, or that it's an implied suggestion that he's too clumsy to dance.