The Republican National Committee took a step in late April that no political party had ever taken before. In an attack video targeting President Joe Biden, the RNC asked voters to imagine the horrible things that might happen in the Democrat’s second term, and as part of the pitch, Republicans included AI-created images.
By any fair measure, it was an unusually odd argument. Biden’s actual record apparently wasn’t scary, so the RNC found it necessary to peddle literally fake, made-up images referring to events that have not occurred.
Nevertheless, it marked a provocative moment in the history of political messaging: A major political party relied on artificial intelligence to go after a rival.
This week, as The New York Times noted, it happened again, but in a slightly different way.
As Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida begins to aggressively attack former President Donald J. Trump, his campaign has spread three images of the former president embracing Dr. Anthony S. Fauci that forensic experts say are almost certainly realistic-looking “deepfakes” generated by artificial intelligence.
The campaign video included legitimate photographs, but they were interspersed with bogus images of Trump hugging and kissing Fauci.
A casual viewer would assume the images were real. Indeed, that was almost certainly the point: DeSantis and his team appear to have used AI in the hopes of deceiving the public.








