The latest Melania conspiracy theory is so ridiculous that it might actually be true

Move over “Fake Melania”, there’s a new conspiracy theory about the ex-FLOTUS currently taking hold of the internet.

Melania Trump has been a hot topic of conversation ever since Donald Trump was indicted last month for allegedly making hush money payments to Stormy Daniels during the 2016 presidential election.

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Is it true? We don’t know. You tell us. But many people are saying it.

People magazine has run a number of stories quoting anonymous sources who say she’s basically been holed up at Mar-a-Lago, pissed at her husband, and not interested in engaging with anyone.

This week, the ex-FLOTUS finally issued a statement addressing the online chatter about her marriage and emotional state as her husband faces 34 felony criminal charges connected to the alleged hush money payments.

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The ex-FLOTUS has been totally MIA since her husband was indicted last week.

“News organizations have made assumptions about the former First Lady’s stance on subjects that are personal, professional, and political over the past few weeks,” her office tweeted on Tuesday. “In these articles, unnamed sources are cited to bolster the author’s claims.”

“We ask readers to exercise caution and good judgment when determining whether or not stories concerning the former First Lady are accurate, particularly when they fail to cite Mrs. Trump as a source of information.”

We ask readers to exercise caution and good judgment when determining whether or not stories concerning the former First Lady are accurate, particularly when they fail to cite Mrs. Trump as a source of information.

— Office of Melania Trump (@OfficeofMelania) April 11, 2023

But if Melania was hoping to take some of the spotlight off herself by confronting the rumors head-on, she can think again.

Slate used the GPTZero tool, which detects whether something was generated by an actual living human being or A.I. chatbots, and found that Melania’s statement was “likely” written by a robot. A second detector, ZeroGPT, said there was a 63% chance the statement it was machine-generated.

Reporter Ben Mathis-Lilley writes:

For a piece of writing that is only three sentences long, there is a lot of filler in it; as banal as many public relations statements may be, they mostly avoid employing book-report tropes like dictionary definitions and random lists of categories.

When asked whether she used A.I. to write the statement, Melania’s office declined to comment. But it certainly wouldn’t be out-of-character for the ex-FLOTUS. Plagiarism seems to come almost as naturally to her as not giving a f*ck about Christmas.

Slate notes:

In 2016, she delivered a speech at the Republican National Convention which included language copied from a speech Michelle Obama had given in 2008. In 2018, a BuzzFeed writer observed that a booklet about cyberbullying whose authorship was attributed by the White House to “First Lady Melania Trump and the Federal Trade Commission” had actually been released in largely identical form in 2014, before Donald Trump took office. (The White House’s announcement was then altered to say that the first lady “promoted” the booklet.)

So, did Melania really use A.I. to craft her statement?

Who knows?

We really don’t care, do you?

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