US president Donald Trump has taken a break from lashing out at Keir Starmer and recently departed members of his own administration to launch a new attack on the BBC, this time accusing it of using AI to create his speeches and branding it as “corrupt, fraudulent news.”
This comes as the corporation recently filed a motion to dismiss Trump’s multi-billion defamation lawsuit over a 2024 Panorama documentary.
The programme drew criticism last year, after separate sections of a long speech by Trump were edited together to allegedly create the impression that he had incited his supporters to storm the Capitol building in 2021, following his election defeat to Joe Biden.
The controversy led to the resignation of BBC director-general Tim Davie, amidst allegations that Panorama had selectively edited Mr Trump’s remarks.
BBC chair Samir Shah apologised on behalf of the broadcaster at the time over an “error of judgement” and accepted that the editing of the 2024 documentary gave “the impression of a direct call for violent action.”
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Asked about the lawsuit yesterday, Trump told reporters in the Oval Office that footage had been edited and claimed that AI had been used to generate the clips.
“They put words in my mouth, and they said I said some pretty bad things, and I didn’t say them, it was AI-generated.
“And I said, ‘I never said that’. Some of my people said, ‘Wow, that was pretty bad stuff you said’, I said, ‘What did I say?’
“I’m pretty good at this stuff. I mean, if you can go through years of these press conferences and you’re the popular president of the United States that won in a landslide, that won all seven swing states, that got record numbers of votes – I guess I’m OK at this stuff.
“I said, ‘I never said that’, and then we found out it was AI-generated.”
Trump also piled in on the BBC’s coverage of his current belligerent “excursion” to Iran, describing it as “so inaccurate” and “unbelievable”.
“We have decimated that country, and if you watch BBC it’s almost like they’re fighting us to a draw. It was very inaccurate news, it was fake news,” the President noted, before crediting himself with inventing the term “fake news.”.
“I’m very proud of the term ‘fake news’ because it was my term, I came up with it – but it’s no longer accurate. It really is corrupt, fraudulent news. It really is – it’s fraudulent. It’s not just fake, it’s beyond fake. It’s really criminal what they do,” he continued.
Prolific North has contacted the BBC for comment.
