A huge controversy erupted this week when a TV show hosted by Matt Gaetz on One America Network aired strikingly beautiful pictures of women soldiers. The images used in the program were not of actual soldiers but were AI-generated images by Elon Musk’s Grok AI. Questions were immediately raised about whether the Department of Defense provided fake images of women soldiers to brag about new increased recruitment of women soldiers.
It all started during Monday’s One America News show. Kingsley Wilson, spokesperson for the Defense Department, talked with Gaetz about some encouraging recruitment figures. He revealed that female enlistments had witnessed the biggest growth, more than doubling to 24,000 this year from 16,000 last year, according to Wilson. During this revelation, a series of photos of women in military uniforms was shown on screen.
Soon many viewers noticed that the images carried visible Grok AI watermarks on them, revealing that the images shown during the program were not the original images of recruited women soldiers.
The Pentagon quickly denied that it issued the photos. A Defense Department official said the department did not create or distribute these images. But confusion escalated when the Pentagon Rapid Response X account also posted an online video of that excerpt. This post focused on the recruitment claims, even though the broadcast included the AI-generated photos.
Meanwhile, the Army said in June it had already filled 61,000 posts of its next recruitment target for 2025. The numbers back up Wilson’s increased enlistment aclaim, though the official data did not specify the exact share of female recruits.
However, the use of AI-generated images in this instance has led some to question whether recruitment figures are factually correct. The Defense Department has distanced itself from the blame, but the decision to circulate the broadcast clip has left uncertainty over its position.
The issue was later addressed by program host Matt Gaetz the next day, when he apologized for airing AI-generated images of women soldiers. He admitted that images were generated by Grok and not provided by the Department of Defense. “We’ll use better judgment going forward,” Gaetz said.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who has argued against women in combat, did not respond to a series of questions about the matter. However, his department continues to emphasize that recruitment goals are being met ahead of schedule.
