The creators of a controversial AI-generated video shared by President Donald Trump on social media say they never meant to become a “propaganda machine,” and that their video, which depicts an outlandish vision of Gaza featuring bearded dancers in bikinis and a giant golden Trump statue, was created as satire.
The video’s creators, Solo Avital and Ariel Vromen, are two of the co-founders of Los Angeles-based EyeMix Visuals, which partly uses artificial intelligence to create commercials and promotional media.
Speaking for the first time about the video, the pair told NBC News that it came about as a sort of pilot project as they experimented with an AI software called Arcana.
They’re not sure how their video ended up in Trump’s hands — but Vromen said he shared an early version with Mel Gibson, who Trump named as a special ambassador to Hollywood in January and who collaborated with EyeMix and Arcana on a previous project. While Gibson told them that he shared some of the creators’ other work with people close to Trump, the creators said he denied sharing the Gaza video with the president. A request for an interview with Gibson was declined by a representative.
As part of testing the AI software, Avital and Vromen tried to create a video with an eight-hour turnaround. But they hadn’t decided their topic until Trump announced a bizarre idea for the future of Gaza.
“It was exactly the same minute that Trump was announcing this thing on TV, like, almost like in the background, you know, it was, ‘Hey, why don’t we do that? Let’s do a little satire,’” Avital recounted.
On Feb. 4, during a news conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump suggested that the U.S. could relocate Palestinians, at least temporarily, to other countries, and “level the site” to create a “Riviera of the Middle East.”
Vromen said he was in Las Vegas when Trump made his proposal, which inspired the idea and aesthetics of the video. “The idea was like, how Trump wants to turn Gaza into Vegas,” Vromen said. “We wanted to have an internal laugh about it. It was a joke.”
The video, completed on Feb. 6 according to records Avital and Vromen showed NBC News, delivered on that vision, with absurd depictions of Elon Musk eating pita, Trump sipping tropical drinks shirtless with Netanyahu, and dollar bills raining down on Palestinian children.
Avital and Vromen, who are from Israel and now live in the United States, each said the video was satire, taking Trump’s proposal and pushing it to an extreme level of imagination, but it wasn’t necessarily critical. Vromen said that he thinks Trump’s proposal is one of the few forward-thinking policy proposals that could address a longstanding stalemate in the region.
“You look at Trump Gaza, and you’re like, ‘Hey, gazillion times better than what it is right now, whether it’s good or bad,’” he said. “With humor, there is truth, you know, but it was not our intention to be a propaganda machine.”
Trump’s suggestion caused shock waves across the world, with some analysts and politicians comparing the proposal of displacing 2.2 million Palestinians to ethnic cleansing. While supported by some in Israel and the U.S., Trump’s suggestion was widely condemned, even by some allies. After Hamas’ attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, in which 1,200 people were killed and another 250 kidnapped, local Palestinian officials say Israel has killed over 47,500 Palestinians.
Vromen explained that the bearded dancers in the video were meant to poke fun at members of Hamas. “Yes, that was a disrespectful, maybe, portrayal,” he said, pointing out Hamas’ recent handling of dead Israeli hostages, which outraged many Israelis.
“The real intention of this specific piece — I thought that Gaza will be so liberated that it will become woke,” Avital said.
After the duo finished the video, they shared it with a limited group of people. “We circulated it in a few groups of friends to get a reaction, like you’re writing a draft of a script,” Vromen said. “I posted [it] for about three hours on my Instagram, and I took it off because I started to get some brands that didn’t understand, again, the context.”
Vromen is a film director and DJ who may be best known for the 2012 movie The Iceman, which features Chris Evans, Winona Ryder, James Franco and Michael Shannon. He has 138,000 Instagram followers.
Online, the video didn’t appear to travel widely before Trump shared it on his pages. NBC News found several pro-Israel social media accounts that shared the video in the days after Vromen briefly posted it, but it had not picked up any notable traction in the weeks after.
Avital said he was shocked when three weeks later Trump posted it on Truth Social and Instagram with no caption.
He said he was surprised Trump would post a video that contained a scene of him dancing with a woman in a club that wasn’t his wife, and a scene of “himself standing erected in the center of the city as a golden statue, like some sort of a dictator.”
“I would never imagine in my life,” he said.
The pair said they wish Trump would have given some context with the video, or offered some credit.
“At least give the context that this is something that was done with mixed intentions, because one intention was just like to react to news that was mind-blowing. And the other intention was like, ‘Hey, maybe there is a vision behind it,’” said Vromen.
He also said he feels Trump had stolen the video.
“Trump has stolen our content because this was made by artists,” Vromen said. “The Gaza Strip movie is perfect, unique original content that was taken out of context and published by the president of the United States.”
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
White House deputy press secretary Anna Kelly previously said: “As President Trump has said, Gaza in its current state is unhabitable for any human being. President Trump is a visionary, and his plan to have the United States involved in Gaza’s rebuilding will allow for Palestinians to resettle in new, beautiful communities while improving conditions in the region for generations to come.”
Generative AI has helped facilitate a boom of fake political imagery, which has been particularly embraced by Trump and members of the GOP. Trump and Musk have frequently shared AI-generated images glorifying themselves or denigrating others.
Arcana Labs CEO Jonathan Yunger called the video “complete insanity,” but welcomed the idea of artists expressing themselves via Arcana Labs’ platform.
“The video is not breaking any laws, as far as I’m concerned. And artists are going to express themselves. What people decide to do with that, you know, is up to them,” said Yunger. “The fact that the president took it and posted it as his own, I think, is the one of the most insane things I’ve ever seen in my life.”
This article originally appeared on chof360.com. Read more from NBC News:
