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The creator of the viral 'Trump Gaza' AI-generated video that showed the US President's so-called vision of the Gaza Strip, with him chilling with a shirtless Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on sun loungers, has spoken out. The LA-based filmmaker said the video was meant to be a "political satire" with zero context, and it was posted on social media without his "consent or knowledge".
"We are storytellers, we’re not provocateurs, we sometimes do satire pieces such as this one was supposed to be. This is the duality of the satire: it depends what context you bring to it to make the punchline or the joke. Here there was no context and it was posted without our consent or knowledge," Solo Avital told The Guardian.
The video, which Avital claimed to have made in less than eight hours while experimenting with AI tools in February, spread like wildfire after Donald Trump shared it on his official Instagram account. He said the circulation's reach "surprised the hell out of me".
The video gained attention in February, days after Trump's announcement that the US would "take over" the Palestinian enclave and his plan to resettle Palestinians elsewhere to develop Gaza as the 'Riviera of the Middle East'. It showed the transformation of Gaza from rubble to a luxurious coastal city featuring beaches, high-rise and nightclubs along with a mammoth gold statue of the US President.
Avital, an Israel-born US citizen, said he was experimenting with the Arcana AI platform, and decided to create "satire about this megalomaniac idea about putting statues [in Gaza]", according to The Guardian.
Avital and his business partner, Ariel Vromen, run a company called 'EyeMix' where they produce documentaries and commercials. He told The Guardian that he shared the AI video with his friends, while Vromen posted it on his Instagram account for a few hours before Avital urged his business partner to take it down as it may have been a "little insensitive" and "we don't want to take sides".
However, the pair had shared an early version of the video clip with Mel Gibson, one of Trump's three special ambassadors to Hollywood and who has collaborated with EyeMix and Arcana in the past. The actor told the duo about sharing another video about the Los Angeles wildfire with Trump, but denied sharing the Gaza one with the US President.
Avital's business partner, Vromen, is the director of the 2012 film 'The Iceman' starring Chris Evans, Winona Ryder and Michael Shanon.
Avital first heard about the AI video's spread when his phone was bombarded by thousands of messages as his friends notified him of Trump's Instagram post.
The creator bears a positive view about AI, calling it the "best thing that's happened to creativity by a long shot". However, he hoped the experience would trigger a "public debate about rights and wrongs" of generative AI, including what the creators' rights are. Avital also told The Guardian that the experience underpinned for him regarding the speed at which fake news circulates "when every network takes what they want and shoves it down their viewers with their narratives attached".
Published On:
Mar 7, 2025
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