Hizzoner is giving lip to critics who claim he used AI for city videos showing him speaking high-level Mandarin and Bengali.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s team flatly denied that artificial intelligence was used in the pair of clips he released last week to promote the city’s giveaway of 2,000 free Broadway show tickets for high school students.

“And just to be clear this is NOT AI,” Mamdani’s press secretary and chief spokesperson Joe Calvello wrote on X Sunday in response to the video in which the mayor addresses the camera comfortably speaking Mandarin for 41 seconds while seated at his desk.

Some native Mandarin speakers praised his pronunciation, but others called the attempt “slow” and “stiff” — while others questioned whether he used artificial intelligence. X/@NYCMayor

Mamdani, who was born in Uganda and raised in New York, was known for speaking to constituents in their native languages during his successful run for office, including Arabic, Hindi and Urdu.

But his apparent mastery of the Chinese language, spoken by over 1.1 billion people worldwide, was not unveiled until Saturday’s promotional video touting the Theater Development Fund’s ticket giveaway.

A Mamdani spokesperson told the New York Times that the mayor studied Mandarin at the elite Bronx High School of Science, where he graduated in 2010, but said he hadn’t studied or spoken the language since.

Native Mandarin speakers responding to the mayor’s X post for the most part praised his diction, though many speculated it was AI-assisted, or repeatedly rehearsed.

“He doesn’t really know Mandarin but seems to have practiced this little speech diligently,” one said.

Queens Councilman Phil Wong, a native Mandarin speaker, agreed.

“Sounds accurate. Probably rehearsed many times,” Wong told The Post on Monday.

“He did pretty good,” added Brooklyn Councilwoman Susan Zhuang, also a fluent speaker.

“He doesn’t speak Chinese but his accent is pretty good. I’d say’s B, B+,” she told The Post. “The problem is he put it on the wrong platform. Chinese use WeChat. People only speaking Chinese aren’t on Facebook or Twitter.”

“His pronunciation is very accurate; it’s just that the rhythm is a bit stiff,” another Mandarin speaker weighed in on X, in a comment translated from Chinese. “That’s already very impressive,”

Another commenter also praised Mamdani’s pronunciation, writing “this would be very good for a non-native speaker who started studying as an adult, let alone a guy who hasn’t even studied the language.”

“His pronunciation is very good for a beginner,” another user weighed in, adding, “He made a few linguistic errors. For example he said ‘I don’t know Mandarin’ (as in to know a fact) instead of ‘I cannot speak Mandarin.'”

But some commenters thought the mayor was sneakily deploying AI to tidy up his words.

“Everyone eating this up like it’s not AI,” wrote a skeptical X user.

“Not that hard to use AI to fix the fluency,” noted another.

According to city statistics, 330,000 New Yorkers speak Chinese at home as their primary language.

The mayor also posted another near-identical video speaking Bangla, or Bengali, the native language of Bangladesh, which is spoken by approximately 265 million people worldwide including roughly 71,000 households across the five boroughs.

Most commenters fluent in Bengali praised his pronunciations.

Roughly 109,000 New Yorkers speak Russian at home, and another 52,000 communicate chiefly in Yiddish — though neither group was represented in the promotional campaign.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani spoke Bengali to promote a Broadway ticket giveaway in a recent video posted from his official X account. X/@NYCMayor

A third and final take of the promotional video was shot with the mayor speaking Spanish, spoken by some 843,000 New York residents at home.

Mamdani was accused of faking his Spanish fluency with AI on the campaign trail last year.

Republican State Assemblyman Jake Blumencranz doubted the authenticity of two campaign videos showing Mamdani speaking Spanish and commissioned an independent analysis to determine whether AI was used.

According to Blumencranz, the video had “sufficient indicators of digital alteration.” Mamdani’s camp responded by releasing a blooper reel showing his many failed attempts to get each line correct.