Defense Department spokeswoman Kingsley Wilson bragged about the supposed increase of female military recruits on Wednesday using fake AI-generated images.
In an interview on One America News (OAN), Wilson told host Matt Gaetz that there has been an increase in female military recruits compared to last year. Wilson credited the alleged increase in female military recruits to Donald Trump and Secretary Pete Hegseth’s leadership.
“These numbers are fantastic,” Wilson said. “Under the previous administration, we had about 16,000 female recruits last year; now we’ve got upwards of 24,000. It is a testament to Secretary Hegseth and President Trump’s leadership.”
As she spoke, four images of women scrolled onscreen in military uniform. All four images are fake and appear to have been generated by Elon Musk’s chatbot Grok, according to CNN.
OAN took responsibility for the images, telling CNN, “the images violated company policies, which have been re-enforced with all staff. An on-air correction has been put in place. Management has taken additional actions to ensure the issue is appropriately addressed.”
Gaetz also apologized for using the images on his show Thursday.
“We made a mistake,” he said. “We used AI-generated images of female service members as part of our B-roll package, and we shouldn’t have. The DOD didn’t give us these images; Grok did. And we’ll use better judgment going forward.”
Still, the DoD promoted Wilson’s segment which remains on the department’s X social media account.
