{"id":27060,"date":"2026-10-31T14:52:37","date_gmt":"2026-10-31T14:52:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/2026\/10\/31\/how-much-ai-is-too-much-ai-in-campaign-ads-huffpost\/"},"modified":"2026-10-31T14:52:37","modified_gmt":"2026-10-31T14:52:37","slug":"how-much-ai-is-too-much-ai-in-campaign-ads-huffpost","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/2026\/10\/31\/how-much-ai-is-too-much-ai-in-campaign-ads-huffpost\/","title":{"rendered":"How Much AI Is Too Much AI In Campaign Ads? – HuffPost"},"content":{"rendered":"

The midterms will shape our future. HuffPost holds power accountable. Become a member to keep independent journalism strong.
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Spending on AI-assisted ads has surged from next to nothing to $137 million in the midterms. But voter wariness of \u201cslop\u201d is real.
Senior Reporter, HuffPost
It\u2019s roughly 45 seconds into the clip<\/a> when the salient point is revealed: \u201cThis ad was created with AI.\u201d
The words come from the mouth of Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro<\/a> (D). Except it isn\u2019t Shapiro. It\u2019s an AI \u201cdeepfake<\/a>\u201d version of him in a video supporting his Republican challenger, Stacy Garrity.
By the time the disclaimer kicks in, the ad has already shown the deepfake Shapiro confessing to using secret payouts to quash sexual harassment accusations against an aide, taking money tied to Jeffrey Epstein, and other alleged misdeeds. They just so happen to mirror accusations Garrity has repeatedly made against her opponent. The GOP campaign has defended<\/a> the spot; Shapiro\u2019s spokesperson called it<\/a> \u201ccheap, dishonest AI bullshit.\u201d
Welcome to \u201cthe first AI election.\u201d That\u2019s how Travis Ridout, co-director of the Wesleyan Media Project<\/a>, sees the 2026 midterms, the first in which campaigns have truly embraced artificial intelligence.
According to Wesleyan University\u2019s tracking of election advertising, $137 million was spent on 220 ads that are at least partly AI-generated up until Oct. 11, with most of the spots sponsored by Republican candidates or groups. By contrast, the project identified just $50,000 in spending on AI-generated ads in the 2024 cycle.
Researchers and campaigns agree that AI-assisted ads are here to stay. Ad directors talk enthusiastically about how technology has allowed creativity to flourish on tight budgets and carry out the menial \u201claundry\u201d work that buys space and time to work on the bigger thinking.
But explosive growth from 2026 onwards is not a given, they say. Voters are deeply uncomfortable with \u201cAI slop,\u201d controversy engulfs deepfakes, and a patchwork of laws has led to a \u201cde facto ban\u201d on the technology in some states.
And it would be a reach to say the midterms have reached a nightmarish \u201cslopocalypse,\u201d where AI-fueled drivel is overwhelming. The $137 million AI spend is a drop in the bucket compared to the billions of dollars lavished on campaigns.
\u201cI suspect a lot of campaigns are going to wait and see how well this is received before jumping in with both feet in the future,\u201d said Ridout.
\u201cWhat is the appetite of professionals to put AI front and center in ads if the public is turning against AI?\u201d
The Shapiro ad represents perhaps the most heightened version of a tactic \u2014 generating a \u201ccandidate likeness\u201d \u2014 that, as of now, is predominantly being used by Republicans, often in battleground races.
Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff (D) warned<\/a> of \u201ca slippery slope toward the destruction of truth in political debate\u201d after a fake version of him was depicted in a hair and nail salon in a disclaimer-free 30-second ad<\/a> hyping his GOP rival, Rep. Mike Collins.
Ads supporting Bruce Blakeman, the Republican candidate for New York governor, in his battle against Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) are so frequently AI fabrications that a complaint<\/a> has been filed with electoral officials over \u201cmisleading\u201d voters.
Democrats have made a point of their relative abstention from AI in the New York race. \u201cUnlike Bruce Blakeman, we don\u2019t use AI to make our videos,\u201d wrote<\/a> New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani while introducing an ad that hails Hochul as \u201cthe real deal.\u201d
Ridout argues that many of the ads labeled as AI-assisted are not especially problematic. AI might have generated background actors, not unlike creating customized secondary \u201cb-roll\u201d footage that directors would typically pull from an agency such as Getty or Shutterstock.
For Trent Wisecup<\/a>, a political consultant involved in Republican campaigns in almost all of the battleground Senate races, AI is \u201cembedded into every aspect of our creative process.\u201d This includes producing background footage but also testing ideas with supplementary focus groups that he calls \u201csynthetic panels of AI personas.\u201d
On the other side of the aisle, Larry Huynh<\/a>, the managing partner of Democratic consulting firm Trilogy Interactive, uses AI to streamline manual work, which frees up time to \u201cwork on the things that really get you juiced.\u201d He cites using AI to enhance existing content, specifically removing a buzzer sound interrupting a candidate while making a clip-worthy statement at a debate.
Far more contentious is how AI ads are labeled, thanks to laws dictating how transparent candidates should be.
Four states \u2014 California, Maryland, Minnesota and Texas \u2014 have laws<\/a> that prohibit certain uses or types of AI-generated deepfakes in political messaging, and 27 states insist on some form of disclosure.
It\u2019s a patchwork, which largely explains the Wesleyan Media Project\u2019s uneven findings. It discovered ads assisted by AI in 34 states, suggesting some markets are no-go zones. And only 27% of the ads researchers came across included a disclaimer, which raises questions about honest disclosure.
Ridout thinks concern should focus less on whether AI is used as a tool to produce an ad, and more on how far a spot is a \u201cdeparture from reality.\u201d He thinks this quandary may inform how states approach labeling ads in the future.
\u201cIf I\u2019m using it to do some very simple things, but technically I then have to have a disclaimer that I\u2019m using AI, you get concerned that that affects the entire impact of your ad.\u201d
Wisecup says it\u2019s \u201cunfortunate\u201d that opaque regulations are stopping the \u201cincidental uses of AI in campaigns,\u201d pointing to how Michigan requires a spoken disclaimer on ads \u2014 a \u201cde facto ban on the use of AI\u201d in the state. \u201cNobody really wants to go through that many hoops to deploy AI in an ad,\u201d he said.
Huynh, who is co-chair of the American Association of Political Consultants\u2019 committee on AI, calls the regulations a \u201cmess,\u201d problematic even for the limited use of AI in campaign videos. \u201cIf I\u2019m using it to do some very simple things, but technically I then have to have a disclaimer that I\u2019m using AI, you get concerned that that affects the entire impact of your ad,\u201d he said.
The public\u2019s dim view of AI is perhaps the most powerful restraint on wall-to-wall AI advertising in 2026.
According to Ridout, using AI deepfakes is a high-wire strategy. \u201cThere are risks to using them as well as potential rewards. I don\u2019t know which outweighs the other at this point,\u201d he said, adding that around 45% of the AI-assisted ads the college researchers identified included a \u201cphotorealistic deepfake\u201d of a candidate.
Wisecup, a partner and creative director at FP1 Strategies, says future public opinion is among a series of \u201cunknowns\u201d potentially undermining the rise of AI ads. \u201cWhat is the appetite of professionals to put AI front and center in ads if the public is turning against AI?\u201d he asked.
And yet he believes AI is \u201ctransformative technology,\u201d allowing a director on a tight production budget to think like a Madison Avenue ad man and push ahead with an idea that would otherwise have been junked because of cost.
Wisecup is an advocate for ads created entirely with generative AI, especially as a tool for satire and parody, if it\u2019s used responsibly and ethically. \u201cI think it plays better if it has a humorous bent to it,\u201d he said.
He highlights a 30-second ad<\/a> he created for a super PAC supporting the South Carolina gubernatorial campaign of Republican Attorney General Alan Wilson, which mocks rival Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) and what the ad portrays as her liberal tendencies.
The ad, \u201cName That Nancy,\u201d uses a game show conceit, complete with a studio audience and an announcer. In it, contestants are presented with a quote and asked whether the words were uttered by Mace or Democratic Party grandee Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.).
An ad that would have cost $100,000 to make in the real world took Wisecup six hours to produce with AI.
\u201cNobody\u2019s going to focus on the AI and be like, \u2018Oh, they\u2019re trying to deepfake me and dupe me into thinking something,\u2019\u201d he said. \u201cIt was just a funny, clever ad.\u201d
But if they use deepfakes, campaigns risk entering a \u201cdanger zone\u201d because \u201cvoters are going to reject that in probably a real and profound way,\u201d he added.
On the Democrat side, Huynh says he has yet to find \u201ca use case\u201d for creating video entirely with generative AI.
\u201cI think there is, at least on our side, some hesitancy on creating something with AI that didn\u2019t exist before,\u201d he said. It echoes the Wesleyan Media Project finding that only 12% of the AI ads it came across were sponsored by Democrats, and doubtless reflects the party\u2019s candidates often opposing the unchecked expansion of AI data centers.
His team has \u201cplayed around\u201d with AI, Huynh said. But generative videos have \u201cvisual cues that feel like it was generated by AI,\u201d which puts him off of the idea. Huynh is not certain AI ads will take off in the future since \u201cpeople\u2019s reaction to something that they feel is AI slop is real.\u201d
\u201cThe public\u2019s comfort with AI has changed very quickly,\u201d he said, adding: \u201cEven if I did something great with AI, and I\u2019m trying to still convince voters of voting for my candidate or voting against another candidate, but they really hate AI right now, or AI is incredibly unpopular, I don\u2019t know if I want to be associated with something like that.\u201d<\/p>\n

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The midterms will shape our future. HuffPost holds power accountable. Become a member to keep independent journalism strong.Already a member? Log in to hide these messages.Spending on AI-assisted ads has surged from next to nothing to $137 million in the midterms. But voter wariness of \u201cslop\u201d is real.Senior Reporter, HuffPostIt\u2019s roughly 45 seconds into the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":27061,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-27060","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27060","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27060"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27060\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/27061"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27060"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27060"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27060"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}