Spencer Pratt is running for mayor of Los Angeles, and before you ask what his qualifications are, I should point out that Los Angeles is also a city where a juice cleanse counts as a platform. The bar clears itself.
The notable development, according to Fox News host and former congressman Jason Chaffetz, is that Pratt is using AI-generated political ads depicting the incumbent mayor, and this will “forever change how political ads are done.” Forever is a long time. I once thought the Flowbee would forever change how haircuts were done. Institutions are resilient.
But let us take the claim seriously, because taking things seriously is how you find out they are not serious. Political advertising has always been the art of making a candidate look like something they are not. AI-generated imagery simply removes the middleman — the consultant, the focus group, the carefully coached lighting director — and hands the unreality directly to the algorithm. In that sense, yes, something has changed. We have achieved full vertical integration of the illusion.
Chaffetz, a man who left Congress to become a television personality and is now a television personality commenting on a television personality running for office, called this revolutionary. The word “revolutionary” is doing considerable load-bearing work in that sentence. Revolutions, classically, involve overturning a power structure. What we appear to have here is a power structure endorsing its own reflection in a funhouse mirror and calling the mirror visionary.
The incumbent mayor being depicted in these AI ads did not generate them, which is the one genuinely new wrinkle. Previously, a candidate needed to actually say something embarrassing before you could run it against them. The democratic process has always involved a little creative editing, but we have now graduated to creative existence. Your opponent need not have done anything. They need only have a face, which most of them do, though that is increasingly optional.
Will this change campaigning forever? Almost certainly not. Voters have demonstrated a remarkable capacity to ignore political ads in every medium ever invented. The ads become more sophisticated; the ignoring keeps pace. It is the one truly bipartisan achievement of the last fifty years, and no AI is going to touch it.