Good news, everybody: We’ve figured out why Democrat Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois is very concerned about AI deepfakes.
It’s not because he believes that fake images generated by ChatGPT or Grok are going to confuse smart people, or even the average person. He’s like your dim, aged Uncle Dick from Springfield, who wants to ban high-speed internet because he doesn’t get why we can’t just stick to AOL after he spent long learning it. He doesn’t understand these socials medians things with the Facebookers and the Instantgrammars and whatnot. Why can’t he just stick to “Keyword: PBS?”
On Wednesday, Durbin — the Senate minority whip, by the way, meaning he’s the second-most powerful Democrat in the upper chamber — went to the floor to decry the shooting of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. He had with him a photo of what he said was the shooting.
“I’m going to show a photo of that scene, which is graphic,” Durbin said as he hoisted a picture up. “But I’m afraid it’s necessary to appreciate the horror of the moment.”
“This photo shows the last seconds before the ICE agent killed Alex Pretti on the streets of Minneapolis,” he said, showing Pretti kneeling down with three ICE agents around him, one with a gun pointed at him.
“In [Pretti’s] right hand is his camera, the left hand holding the ground,” Durbin said. “No gun obvious, no effort to resist obvious.”
He then proceeded to speak for another seven-plus minutes about the death of Pretti with the picture behind him without noticing another obvious thing: The photo he was using was so obviously AI-generated that one of the ICE agents didn’t have a head on him.
Dem. Sen. Dick Durbin criticized Trump for warning Americans not to believe libs’ narrative on the Alex Pretti shooting.
He did this while pointing to a gigantic AI deepfake photo, showing an ICE agent… without a head. Durbin said the fake ‘photo tells the story.’ pic.twitter.com/0tKb9AxvVF
— Josh Manning (@Josh_Manning) January 29, 2026
He wasn’t the only one using this obviously faked photo, mind you:
All the major news outlets shared a fake AI image of Alex Pretti knowing it wasn’t real.
The journalism in America is just Wokeism with a pen.
— 0HOUR1 (@0hour1) January 26, 2026
And this isn’t even the only use of manipulated photos of Pretti to help The Cause. Witness, for example, Nicolle Wallace on MS NOW:
Genuinely embarrassing. Pretending they’re the “eyes and ears” network now. Give me a break, lady. pic.twitter.com/cyZI5f1ECz
— P.T. Ward (@HTWardish) January 27, 2026
He was, however, the most powerful individual to use this photo, and boy did it undermine his remarks:
Way to use the AI photo, retard.
— U.S. Ministry of Truth (@USMiniTru) January 28, 2026
Sigh. The ICE agent on his knees… is headless, sir. This fake news from the floor of the US Senate has been live for nearly 9 hours on your account.
You’re an embarrassment and a disgrace, sir.
— Josh Manning (@Josh_Manning) January 29, 2026
As a practical matter, the headless ICEman is kind of important for a few reasons behind the gallows humor of Uncle Dick not noticing the obvious while talking about things that were “obvious.”
First, we’re still processing what happened in the shooting of Alex Pretti and what it means, or what it should mean. This is nowhere near as clear-cut of a use-of-force case as the Renee Good shooting was; Democrats are, to use the old trope, pouncing upon the moment to say that all immigration enforcement is similarly tainted.
Thus, to portray Pretti’s final moments using an AI deepfake that misrepresents what happened isn’t just stupid but immoral. Moreover, it’s proof that he was speaking about the death of Pretti without even watching the available video of it; there is no shortage of it available to the average person willing to do a few desultory searches on social media, and even more access, one safely assumes, if you’re the Senate minority whip. An even worse possibility: He watched it and thought he could get away with this lie.
Second, the reason Durbin was taking to the floor is attached to the first: Democrats now want to defund the Department of Homeland Security, effectively, stripping money from a carefully crafted compromise in the House that was supposed to get us back to regularly funding the government instead of stomping our feet like children every time spending bills come to the floor and we want to get something.
Pretti’s death suddenly gave Democrats a wedge issue. If the death was this clear-cut, obviously, it becomes a moral obligation for liberals to vote against funding. It was not. Durbin should have known this.
Finally, it brings us to the point that Dick Durbin, the second most-powerful Democrat in the Senate, has also been a champion of a bill banning AI deepfakes, fast-tracking the legislation.
From Axios, Jan. 13:
Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) on Tuesday will call for unanimous consent to pass the bipartisan DEFIANCE Act, a bill to protect people from image-based sexual abuse online, Axios has learned.
Chatbots are coming under fire for producing child sexual abuse material and non-consensual intimate imagery of adults, and people are eager for legal recourse.
Durbin’s move comes in the wake of public outcry over Elon Musk’s X, which hasn’t been able to keep up with the images its Grok chatbot has been producing. [Emphasis ours.]
Now, nobody’s saying that “image-based sexual abuse” is a good thing, but the “public outcry,” such as it has existed on the Democrat side, has more to do with the person than the platforms or problems. Beyond that, however, it’s worth noting how Durbin presented himself as the face of the educated opposition to deepfakes, despite clearly lacking any literacy in the matter.
“The AI boom is fully underway. Leaving it unregulated puts us all at risk,” he said.
More at risk than Durbin even thought, apparently, considering what a fool he made of himself and his own cause with an AI deepfake on the Senate floor less than a month after he said that. Won’t someone bring back AOL dial-up for Uncle Dick from Springfield, please?
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