Political advertising hasn’t historically been known for its honesty or accuracy, and generative artificial intelligence seems poised to take it to the next step.
A campaign ad created entirely with AI will begin airing next week on broadcast, cable and streaming services. It is believed to be the first of its kind to air on the state’s airwaves. The ad features a parody version of Republican candidate Mark Robinson, making remarks that the candidate has actually made in other settings, from social media to religious ceremonies.
Campaign founder Todd Stifel, a Democratic donor who hopes to use AI to recreate Robinson’s comments to garner voters’ attention, has started his own political action committee, Americans for Prosparody, and said he plans to spend about $1 million on the campaign.
“He really said the civil rights movement was crap,” Stifel said. “He really said and believes Obamacare is designed to enslave people. These are really horrible, horrible things.”
Stifel, a Raleigh financier who has donated at least $19,000 to Stein’s campaigns since 2016, according to state campaign finance records, made waves last year with his parody website “Mark Rottenson,” in which a synthesized voice reads invented quotes from a fictional memoir.
Robinson spokesman Mike Lonergan on Tuesday criticized Stifel’s earlier attacks. “Stifel’s article is filled with fake videos and outrageous lies and is typical of the smear campaign Josh Stein and his Democratic allies are waging against Mark Robinson. North Carolina voters will see through it quickly,” Lonergan said.
Stein, the state’s current attorney general and Democratic gubernatorial candidate, has been a harsh critic of Robinson in the past, and her campaign sided with Robinson in February to criticize “Mark Rottenson,” a campaign advocate for the use of AI, and reiterated that position on Tuesday.
“Using AI in political ads is the wrong approach,” Stein’s campaign manager Jeff Allen said in an emailed statement, also criticizing Robinson’s stance on abortion and education funding.
Stifel said the latest ad campaign takes a different approach.
“We realized a lot of people didn’t understand who the person we were referring to was, so we needed to focus more directly on Mark Robinson,” Stifel told WRAL News.
He hopes the new ads, which he calls “over the top,” will reach voters who ignore most other political ads.
“We want to transcend mediums by using humor to reach people, make them laugh and entertain them,” Stifel said.
But for Stiefel, the goal of this ad campaign isn’t the punch line.
“The overall goal is to protect American democracy from extremists,” he said. “The goal is to defeat Mark Robinson and actually defeat him so badly that it puts him on the reverse coattails, drags Trump down, defeats Trump in North Carolina, and upends the entire national election.”
Using AI in election ads doesn’t violate any laws at the federal or state level, but Amanda Sturgill, a journalism professor at Elon University, said using AI to impersonate politicians is ethically questionable.
“The real problem is that using technology, especially one that sounds like the candidate, can be extremely confusing to people,” Sturgill told WRAL.
Stifel said his ads are “covered in disclaimers,” but Sturgill noted that not everyone reads the fine print.
She says advances in technology are making it increasingly easier to create such ads, so voters need to become smarter media consumers.
“It used to be that you could sit down and spend hours of your boredom listening to someone speak and chop up words and cleverly audio edit them to make them say something, but now it’s basically a free app, you know? Anyone can do that. So the speed at which misinformation can be created has increased a lot,” Sturgill said.
Stifel claims the ad is a parody, not a misinformation piece.
“I think this is completely ethical,” he told WRAL. “Using his words to criticize him is something I have no problem with.”
