Leaders did not repeat AI claims about Oct 17 French riots

Although campaigns have nodded to AI regulation and fears over the technology’s risks, it is datacenters that candidates have repeatedly and specifically called out as a real, tangible threat to constituents.

Though the video captured the voices and likenesses of Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Gov. Kathy Hochul, the ad was actually an A.I.-generated fabrication. It was produced by the campaign of Bruce Blakeman, the Republican candidate for governor.

“Folks are looking for leaders in this space to make sure that we are putting the right guardrails in place so that we can reap the benefits without the immense catastrophic downsides that are possible.” · What’s surprising is that his arguments for regulation have earned him substantial financial support from the A.I. industry. According to a Times analysis, Rutinel has received more than $240,000 from Anthropic and OpenAI employees, and his campaign has benefited from at least $3 million in spending by PACs with ties to A.I.

Chatbots have become yet another source of information that can be exploited for influence campaigns. The most popular models now sometimes cite known sources of politically biased content or foreign disinformation, including news sites fabricated by or mimicked by Kremlin-linked propaganda operations, according to disinformation researchers.

Pennsylvania Republican candidate for governor Stacy Garrity is the latest to spoof her opponent using AI—with an ad showing an AI-generated Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro proudly confessing to scandals and support for data centers.

This operation, nicknamed “Green Cicada,” was deployed to influence political narratives and sow discord in the United States and other countries. Even more recently, new reporting alleges that Russia has turned its Matryoshka bot network on the midterm elections, using it to spread AI-manipulated videos of American celebrities making inflammatory accusations against Democrats. The threat is not only foreign. President Trump and his allies are engaged in a concerted campaign to undermine U.S.

For instance, Haines worked with a candidate in the Denver area who ran this year for what ballots labeled the Regional Transit District Board of Directors. The CampSight system found that when people inquired, the chatbots seemed baffled. Among solutions: the Colorado candidate clued in the AI by posting his profile on the respected election information website Ballotpedia.

“Instead of having AI as a content generator, having AI as a therapist, as a personal advisor, as a tool that you consult for political information,” he said. The question, however, isn’t “Hey, ChatGPT or Claude, who do I vote for?” Popular, large-language models won’t answer that, but will offer context instead. They can also be wrong or, more subtly, miss the point. Anthropic’s Claude had lots of useful information about a campaign finance measure on the California ballot, but summed it up saying it was all about giving candidates more funding choices.

Search Google for how to contribute to his campaign, and you might get an AI-generated answer that links to ways “you can chip in securely.” Until a few weeks ago, one of those featured links was actually controlled by an unrelated political-action committee that sent the money instead to the reelection campaign of another Democrat: Senator John Hickenlooper of Colorado. The mix-up wasn’t all AI’s fault. The link led to a misleading donation page that carried Talarico’s name and picture, and specified only at the bottom that the money would go to Hickenlooper. But Google’s AI tool evidently didn’t read the fine print.