When New York City mayoral candidate Andrew Cuomo launched his first general election campaign ad using AI to depict himself as a subway driver, stock trader and window cleaner, he immediately prompted backlash.
“There are a lot of jobs I can’t do, but I’m ready to be your mayor on Day 1,” Cuomo said in the ad, which was criticized by his main opponent in the race, Zohran Mamdani, for using AI to replace filmmakers.
But Rich Azzopardi, Cuomo’s spokesperson, said that the use of AI got the results the campaign was looking for.
“The New York City media market right now is being peppered with commercials for the New Jersey governor’s race. So, we were looking for something that stood in a bit of a contrast and that broke through,” Azzopardi told NOTUS. “The reaction was good and the ad landed just as we intended.”
“We were looking for an uncanny valley of cartoonishness of AI to break through, and that’s what happened,” Azzopardi said.
It’s an early example of the pressure political consultants are feeling to use AI to reach more voters in a highly competitive media market. The stakes of next year’s midterm elections, forecasted to be the most expensive in history, will be even higher.
“It’s going to be in every part of the workflow,” Maya Hutchinson, cofounder of the progressive political advertising startup BattlegroundAI, told NOTUS.
Hutchinson’s startup was among the first to embrace generative AI in the summer of 2024. And while AI was not the dominant factor in last year’s presidential elections as some predicted, she said that as AI models get more capable, campaigns will need to adjust to this new technology.
“Having worked in this field since the Obama campaign in 2012,” Hutchinson said. “This is really the first time since [social media became a factor] that there has been a sea change in technology that is dramatically impacting how we’re going to be doing our entire workflow.”
Political consultants who spoke to NOTUS said they’re using AI tools like ChatGPT for a wide array of purposes. Some use it for brainstorming, drafting campaign communications and summarizing complex policy memos. Others said they’ve used AI for transforming text into audio voiceovers and generating backgrounds or design elements for social media posts and campaign ads.
AI images and videos have already become a fixture of social media feeds, including some posts from prominent political figures. Only last week, President Donald Trump and Gov. Gavin Newsom blasted social media with competing AI videos fueling the government shutdown blame game.
In one Truth Social video, Trump shared AI depictions of Democratic congressional leaders Sen. Chuck Schumer and Rep. Hakeem Jeffries saying things they never said in front of the White House. In another video, he portrayed Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought as the Grim Reaper looking to cut federal jobs. Newsom, who has tried to replicate Trump’s social media strategy, has posted mocking videos of Republican leaders and images of Trump depicted as Marie Antoinette.
A September poll by the Pew research center indicated that 71% of people said they would “like a political candidate less” if they found out their campaign speech was AI generated. Still, the public is increasingly getting used to seeing AI in a political context, and political operations are trying to embrace it.
Last month, the National Republican Senatorial Committee released an ad attacking Democrat Roy Cooper who’s running for U.S. Senate in North Carolina that was fully made with AI. The NRSC also released a video featuring music and footage made by AI and an AI-generated digital ad mocking Democratic leadership.
“Chairman Scott wanted an NRSC that worked harder and smarter while still being good stewards of donor dollars. Embracing AI checked every box. You still need smart, talented operatives to create effective content, but AI maximizes that same operative’s abilities in a way that can save thousands of dollars and hours, if not days, of work,” an NRSC spokesperson told NOTUS in a statement.
Tim Harper, a senior policy analyst at the Center for Democracy and Technology, said that early polling led by his organization suggests that political consultants across the political spectrum, who in recent years were hesitant to use AI, might be more open to the technology.
“What we learned from consultants is that they expect more pressure to use AI more aggressively for persuasion, for targeting and messaging, for creating video and audio and image generations,” Harper told NOTUS about next year’s midterm elections. “The interest of staying competitive might push campaigns to push boundaries.”
The recent embrace of AI media on political campaigns has coincided with the release of AI video generators by some of the largest AI developers. Earlier this year, Google released Veo 3, which allows users to generate videos that can at times be misleading in nature, from text prompts. Last week, OpenAI released Sora 2, which it paired with a social app by the same name that encourages users to create video replicas of themselves that other users can use.
Julie Sweet, advocacy director at the American Association for Political Consultants, said that this appetite for AI might be especially strong among smaller campaigns that might have to do more with less.
“It is about efficiency and it is about cost,” Sweet said. “If you’re a little campaign that doesn’t have a $200,000 production budget, but you still need to make a bunch of digital ads … how do you generate the amount of content that is necessary these days just to get the number of impressions and eyeballs on all the right platforms?”
Some consultants told NOTUS that the areas AI could be the most transformative for campaigns next year is not in public-facing products such as campaign communications, but in the back end of political operations.
“I don’t think AI is going to show up in ways that voters see in their advertising. It’ll show up in the background of how campaigns are being run, and how it’s going to make consultants more efficient,” David Kanevsky, founder of the Republican political firm 3D Strategic Research, told NOTUS.
He said that while AI is still not good enough in some of the most complex polling tasks like classifying open-ended questions, it has great potential for data analysis, drafting questionnaires, drafting computer code and writing memos.
“Smart campaigns are going to be really strategic about how they use it, and smart consultants will be really strategic about how they use it,” said Topher Williams, founder of the Democratic firm Flatirons Strategies.
“Simply hiring a consultant who’s going to turn around and just use AI to write all of your social media posts, to make all of your images, to make all of your videos — you might not want to hire a firm like that,” Williams said. “Smart campaigns and smart advocacy groups will not want to hire a consultant too heavily reliant on AI.”