From fake images designed to cause fears of an immigrant “invasion” to other demonisation campaigns targeted at leaders such as Emmanuel Macron, far-right parties and activists across western Europe are at the forefront of the political weaponisation of generative artificial intelligence technology.This year’s European parliamentary elections were the launchpad for a rollout of AI-generated campaigning by the European far right, experts say, which has continued to proliferate since.This month, the issue reached the independent oversight board of Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta when the body opened an investigation into anti-immigration content on Facebook.The inquiry by the oversight board will look at a post from a German account featuring an AI-generated image emblazoned with anti-immigrant rhetoric.It is part of a wave of AI-made rightwing content on social media networks.

Posts elsewhere from Europe’s political extremes range from the Italian far right’s deployment of “photo-realistic” images of women and children eating insects to bolster a conspiracy theory about the intentions of “a global elite”, to Irish far-right images of a police officer stamping on Ireland’s flag and Islamophobic memes in the immediate aftermath of the Southport knife murders in the UK.The use of the same models and themes and the same approach to presenting and packaging the images on social media platforms has given rise to a common aesthetic across borders, and in the EU and Britain.In virtually every case, far-right parties and movements have eschewed the use of any sort of watermarking or identifier on the AI images, according to experts.“What we are seeing is the tip of the iceberg because what is coming from individuals and beyond the official channels is even worse,” said Salvatore Romano, the head of research at the nonprofit AI Forensics, which examined the output of parties including France’s National Rally, Reconquête and Les Patriotes.William Allchorn, a senior research fellow at Anglia Ruskin University, said the ease of use of AI models was appealing to a political fringe that had shown an attitude of “pragmatic opportunism” to new technology.

“AI lowers the barriers to entry for creating content.You don’t need coding skills or anything like that to generate these images.It is also symptomatic of far-right views going mainstream or being normalised,” he said, adding that the far right appeared to have fewer moral concerns about AI imagery.Allchorn said more established political parties appeared warier of using AI in official campaigns: “Mainstream actors still have ethical concerns about the effectiveness, authenticity and reliability of these models that far-right or extremist actors are not beholden to.”The German far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party and supporters of its anti-immigrant stance have been avid users of AI image generators.

The image under scrutiny by Meta’s content moderation board features a blond-haired, blue-eyed woman holding up her hand in a stop gesture, with a stop sign and German flag in the background,The text over the image says people should stop coming to Germany because the country does not need more “gang-rape specialists” due to the Green party’s immigration policy,In September, the AfD’s Brandenburg branch produced AI-made campaign adverts that contrast an idealised Germany featuring blond-haired and blue-eyed people with scenes of veiled women walking down streets and a person waving an LGBTQ+ flag,Reality Defender, a US-based deepfake detection firm, said the image could have been produced within minutes,Other pro-AfD groups on Facebook seen by the Guardian use AI images emblazoned with nativist or anti-immigrant slogans.

Another shows a giant pig – an animal whose meat is prohibited from consumption in Islam – chasing a group of people in Islamic clothing, with the slogan “Arabic film version of Godzilla”.Sign up to This is EuropeThe most pressing stories and debates for Europeans – from identity to economics to the environmentafter newsletter promotionIn the aftermath of the Southport stabbings, when a teenager killed three young girls, AI was deployed to advertise protests and to post Islamophobic content, based on false assumptions about the identity of the alleged attacker.One image depicted bearded men in traditional Islamic dress outside parliament, with one waving a knife, behind a crying child in a union jack T-shirt.The tweet was captioned: “We must protect our children!”The far-right activist Tommy Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, has also appeared in AI-generated images and has the technology on his own social media accounts, including one post commemorating D-day that attracted derision because it showed second world war troops marching off the beach and into the sea.Generative AI imagery was identified as an integral part of the campaign strategy of far-fight political parties during this year’s European and legislative elections in France.

Posts on X included images of people approaching a beach on boats, emblazoned with an anti-immigration slogan, and videos criticising the president, Emmanuel Macron.“Only far-right parties consistently used AI-generated visuals to build their websites and represent photo-realistic events that never occurred, making this a distinctive and strategic element of their campaigns,” said Romano of AI Forensics.While Ireland has no successful far-right party mirroring those in other EU states, the use of generative AI surged among the country’s emergent far-right street movement after riots in Dublin in November 2023.A frequent meme has featured Conor McGregor, the former mixed martial arts star who has flirted with far-right language and whose anti-government and anti-migrant messaging resonated with far-right groups.Ciarán O’Connor, a senior analyst at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, said one particularly popular post on X depicted McGregor standing in front of a burning bus – an echo of one of the genuine images from the riots when a vehicle was torched in the city centre.

The image was posted by the far-right UK group Britain First and later tweeted by McGregor himself before he deleted it.It received 20m views.Since then, O’Connor said generative AI had been used in support of anti-immigration protests and groups and to create content to depict specific scenes that appear to be aimed at evoking anti-migrant sentiments.A campaign by the small far-right Irish People party included a post on X where it acknowledged using an AI-generated image of a “supporter” saying they “hardly recognise” where they grew up.In Italy, the populist Lega party published anti-trans and Islamophobic AI-generated images including a bearded pregnant man, a group of men in Arab-style clothing burning a copy of Dante’s Divine Comedy, and Macron posing as a fictional “EU soldier”, in a message with anti-EU overtones.

The political adverts were published on Facebook and Instagram and on the social media accounts of Lega’s leader, Matteo Salvini.Other non-watermarked images on Salvini’s account include images of women and children eating insects, a reference to a popular rightwing conspiracy theory that the EU was preparing to make European citizens eat insect-based food.