San Francisco, USA: Bruce Blakeman, a Republican who is running for governor of New York, released campaign ads featuring Zohran Mamdani, New York City mayor, and Kathy Hochul, the state’s governor, gardening together and collaborating to raise prices for residents.

Another ad features Hochul talking about hiking tolls and fares so people cannot afford to drive or take the subway.

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Neither Hochul nor Mamdani was actually in the ads, which were made using artificial intelligence (AI). A spate of AI-generated ads that are obviously fake but grab voter attention have been a feature of campaigns in the lead up to the pivotal United States midterm elections on November 3.

While regulation has focused on labelling AI deepfakes that could mislead voters, it is “slopaganda” – or identifiably fake ads – that mark this campaign season, says Scott Babwah Brennen, director of New York University’s Center on Technology Policy and co-author of a recent report, Political Slopaganda.

Political candidates and their supporters have spent more than $80m to make more than 164 AI-based ads this election season, according to the Wesleyan Media Project, a non-partisan election advertising tracker. Republican candidates and their backers were behind 80 percent of these ads, the group found.

Blakeman defended his ads, saying they were clearly labelled as AI-generated – a disclaimer the ads do carry for a few seconds at the start – and follow a long tradition of satire and parody in American politics.

But slopaganda – a mix of low-quality AI “slop” and propaganda – is being used to “communicate deeper truths rather than factual truths”, said Brennan, meaning it could shape perceptions of a candidate’s character or ideology and could “impact voter trust”.

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Other such ads showed Sherrod Brown, a Senate Democratic candidate from the state of Ohio, as the last guest at a party, having overstayed his welcome.

James Talarico, a Senate Democratic candidate from the state of Texas, was shown in a blue dress similar to the character Maria from the movie The Sound of Music, while Mike Rogers, a Senate Republican candidate from Michigan, appeared as a superhero.

In San Francisco, when Democratic California state Senator Scott Wiener released an AI chatbot in the high-profile race to succeed House Speaker Emeritus Nancy Pelosi, who represents the tech-industry city in Congress, it drew an immediate backlash.

The chatbot answered around 5,000 questions about his opponent, Connie Chan, parodying her record of ostensibly blocking real estate development in the city, her accent as well as her naturalized citizenship. The move sparked criticism for being bigoted and Wiener withdrew the chatbot, saying that while it was innovative, “it missed the mark”.

No federal law

Deepfake ads have emerged in a landscape that aims to protect political speech, including when done through parody. While there is no federal law regulating ads made with AI deepfakes, 31 states have passed their own laws calling for ads made using AI to be labelled.

“State laws do what they can without encroaching on the First Amendment,” said Ilana Beller, director of State AI Governance and Policy at Public Citizen, a Washington, DC, based consumer rights advocacy group. “There is still a need for a federal law,” she said.

Adam Rose, chief operating officer of Starling Lab, a research centre on technology and human rights co-founded by Stanford University and the University of Southern California, said some changes made by AI could just be colour or voice correction that the government does not need to label. AI-generated ads should not be banned, he said.

Instead, Rose said, candidates are always involved in making “judgement calls” on the ads and these calls reflect on them. For Wiener, Rose said, releasing the chatbot “showed bad judgement. It showed voters something about him”.

Wiener is running to represent San Francisco in the US Congress, a city that is the global epicentre of the AI industry with two of the biggest AI companies, Open AI and Anthropic, based there. The city’s representative will play an important role as legislation around AI emerges, especially as polls show a majority of Americans are more concerned than excited about the technology.

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“This is a transition moment as AI is reshaping our society,” says Ian Krager, a spokesperson for Connie Chan. “This race is a harbinger for the country. It is a moment where we can show the world America can lead the world on AI development without asking working people to bear the cost.

“And it is clear Connie Chan is with working families while Scott Wiener is with the AI companies,” he said, citing the AI chatbot.

As a state senator, Wiener drafted a California law last year requiring AI companies to disclose security incidents where autonomous systems created by extremely large AI models are involved in dangerous or harmful incidents. A less stringent version became law last year. His office did not respond to Al Jazeera’s request for comment.

Labels as clear as food labels

Looking at the final stretch of the November midterms and beyond, Public Citizen’s Beller said there is a need to make labelling of ads that use AI as clear and easily understood as food labels so voters can evaluate them accordingly.

“People need to know to look for labels,” she said, as it’s important to create awareness about AI deepfake ads, especially among younger voters and seniors.

In New York, the Democratic Party has filed a complaint with the state board of elections saying the ads violate disclosure requirements and are “misleading to the voters”.  But Blakeman has said that “people find it humorous. They like satire”.

The ads are “trying to get attention when candidates know there is political power to be gained by getting attention”, said NYU’s Brennen.

With AI deepfake ads only growing, some candidates have publicly said they will not use them. “People seem to like [the candidates] for it,” said Beller.