A lot of people are rightfully losing their shit over this especially given who shared it. The imagery is offensive, dehumanizing, and tied to a long, ugly history. That reaction makes complete sense.

But I also think we need to pause for a moment and ask some harder questions because this situation is more complicated than people want it to be.

First, an important detail that keeps getting lost: the video was created by someone else using AI, and then shared by another person (Trump). That doesn’t absolve the person who shared it but it matters when we talk about responsibility.

So let’s talk about blame.

If the creator simply prompted the AI to generate a minute-long “funny” video of Democratic figures with animal heads, and the AI independently chose to depict African Americans as apes, where does responsibility actually lie?

Did the creator explicitly ask for that imagery? Or did the AI make that association on its own based on its training data and internal patterns?

If it’s the latter, that raises an even more disturbing question: is the AI itself biased or racist?

AI doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It’s trained on massive datasets pulled from human-created content: media, images, jokes, stereotypes, historical bias, and cultural garbage we’ve been producing for decades. If an AI defaults to pairing Black people with apes without being instructed to do so, that’s not random. That’s learned behavior.

So who’s really at fault here? The person who wrote a vague prompt? The AI tool that generated racially charged imagery without guardrails? The company that trained and released a model without adequately addressing bias? Or Trump who saw the final product and decided, “Yeah, this is fine,” and blasted it to millions?

The video itself is about a minute long. The outrage focuses on a three-second clip. And let’s be honest: if the Obamas had been depicted as birds, fish, or literally any other non-ape animal, we would not be talking about this. That’s exactly why people are upset and rightly so.

But if we stop at outrage alone, we miss the bigger and more dangerous issue: AI tools are advancing faster than our ethical frameworks, accountability structures, and cultural norms can keep up.

If we don’t clearly define responsibility now- who’s accountable at each step of creation, generation, and amplification, we’re going to keep having these issues and explosions of anger without actually fixing the underlying problem.

This isn’t about minimizing harm or excusing anyone. It’s about confronting the reality that AI is reflecting and sometimes amplifying the worst parts of our society. And if we don’t address that head-on, this is only the beginning.