AI Is Fueling a New Kind of Political Propaganda

**Nicole Nguyen** (0:00)
This podcast is brought to you by Gartner, the world authority on AI. Explore our AI hub at gartner.com. Earlier this year, a video of a Lego-fied Donald Trump spread online.
In this cartoonish video, Lego Trump launches a missile toward Iran, which is then followed by a wave of Iranian counter-strikes. Then a group of ultra-orthodox Jews, also in Lego form, is shown fleeing an Iranian strike on Tel Aviv. While the country's prime minister, Lego Benjamin Netanyahu, runs to an underground bunker as American Lego soldiers are shown being brought home in coffins draped by American flags.
To be clear, the video clip has nothing to do with the actual Lego group. The Danish toy maker that makes the popular plastic bricks, children have been playing with since 1958 It was created by an Iranian entity called Explosive Media, which has said it produces content without outside influence. But the clip was circulated by the country's state broadcasters under the control of its military, and it didn't stop there. The videos were shared so widely, they even reached by American feet.
As you can probably guess, the Lego videos were created using artificial intelligence tools. Since then, as America's midterm elections nearer, there has been a wave of AI-generated political content popping up on social media feeds in the US as well. Today, we'll look at what happens to our sense of reality, when political figures and bad actors use AI to fill our feeds with targeted, biased and politically motivated content. I'm Nicole Nguyen, personal tech columnist at the Wall Street Journal. It's Saturday, August 8th. This is the second episode of our special series, AI and the Blurring of Reality, where we're examining how the rapid rise in generative AI could be fundamentally altering how we perceive our world. AI Slop is a global phenomenon, and it's a local one too, one that landed this primary season. If you're in the US, you've probably come across a deepfake, an AI-made image or video featuring an often hyper-realistic impersonation. One notable deepfake showed James Talerico, the Democratic Senate candidate from Texas, singing a rendition of My Favorite Things, praising transgender children.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:42)
Boys in white dresses with blue satin sashes, girls dust with hormones till they grow mustaches, changing the gender of all your offspring.

**Nicole Nguyen** (2:53)
The video wasn't real. It was created by the Trump-linked political action committee, Citizens for Sanity, in support of Talerico's opponent, Republican Ken Paxton. Over in California, a fan-made video depicted Los Angeles mayoral hopeful Spencer Pratt as a heroic Batman, I'm just one man. battling a villainous, Thanos-like version of his political opponent, the incumbent mayor, Karen Bass.
Maybe Spencer Pratt should have played Iron Man because in this fight, Thanos won. And if you haven't seen any of the superhero movies in the last decade, all you need to know is Karen Bass advanced to the November runoff. These are just a few examples of a growing wave of AI-generated clips in politics. Not all of them clearly fake, like that showdown between Batman and Thanos.

**Renée DiResta** (3:55)
So I study adversarial abuse, understanding how bad actors manipulate technology and social technology systems.

**Nicole Nguyen** (4:05)
Renee DeResta is an associate professor at Georgetown University. You may recall hearing from her in last week's episode. She says the flood of AI content in our feeds is causing people to be unsure of what's real and what is not. That can result in a perpetually skeptical mindset and make people especially wary of videos that contradict their existing beliefs. All of this creates an unprecedented opportunity for propaganda makers.
You've worked so much with propaganda. Is this technology making propaganda more effective?

**Renée DiResta** (4:39)
Effective is an interesting question. It didn't invent propaganda, obviously. It just industrializes it. It makes it cheaper. It makes it faster to produce.

**Nicole Nguyen** (4:51)
And more sophisticated. For instance, it can be more directed to a specific audience.

**Renée DiResta** (4:57)
You can produce propaganda that has people who look like your target audience in it, whatever your target audience is without having to go out and recruit for a speaker.

**Nicole Nguyen** (5:09)
In 2023, then-New York City Mayor Eric Adams used AI to send robo-calls to constituents in languages other than English, including Mandarin and Yiddish. In the last Republican presidential primary, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis released deep fakes depicting Trump hugging and kissing Dr. Anthony Fauci. The following year, OpenAI reported that Russian, Chinese and Iranian groups used the company's models to create fake content, including comments on social media sites in various languages.
Just this March, there was a new study from USC that found human posters aren't even necessary. An army of AI agents can organize and coordinate propaganda campaigns on social media all by themselves. One of the lead scientists said, Our paper shows that this is not a future threat. It's already technically possible.