We’ve tracked $80M of spending on almost 170 AI-generated political ads this year – it’s weird

Filed 9h ago · Via The Conversation · The Buffoon Desk

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Kevin MacLeod · incompetech.com · CC BY 4.0

Photo: Rjcastillo · CC BY 4.0 · via Wikimedia Commons

The Wesleyan Media Project says this year's midterm cycle has produced roughly 170 unique AI-generated political ads totaling about $80 million in spending, including hyperrealistic deepfakes of figures like Trump, Pelosi, Obama, and Ocasio-Cortez. Only 31% of tracked ads carried any AI disclosure, representing 22% of the spending.

Republican candidates and allied groups accounted for 80% of the ads and 83% of the spending, researchers found, though they stop short of claiming a single cause. Disclaimer wording ranged wildly, from clinical warnings to a North Carolina ad that simply admitted, 'You guessed it! AI was definitely used.'

State law appears to barely matter: 32% of ads carried disclaimers in states without AI-specific legislation versus 29% in states with it. A Minnesota deepfake ad targeting a Democratic Senate candidate aired despite a state ban on exactly that, with researchers noting the law's enforceability remains uncertain.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.

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You can write all the disclosure laws you want, but if nobody checks whether an ad followed them, you've just added a line nobody reads to a commercial nobody trusts. A state banning deepfakes and then watching one air anyway is like posting a 'no trespassing' sign on a gate that was never locked. The real finding here isn't that AI showed up in campaign ads, it's that almost nobody built a fence sturdy enough to notice.

Source: Read the original at The Conversation → Scored: Covert Affair · Kevin MacLeod · CC BY 4.0

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