NYT:

It was an unlikely scene: New York’s mayor and governor appeared to be strolling through a park and gardening together in a sun-drenched suburban yard, promoting a new drug — a “political delusion pill,” they called it — to help voters overcome fears about affordability and crime.

“Side effects may include: chronic wallet shrinkage, higher tax,” a narrator intoned over plucky guitar.

Though the video captured the voices and likenesses of Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Gov. Kathy Hochul, the ad was actually an A.I.-generated fabrication. It was produced by the campaign of Bruce Blakeman, the Republican candidate for governor.

The ad, which included no disclaimer that it was A.I.-made, was one of more than 220 videos identified by the Wesleyan Media Project, a research group based at Wesleyan University, that used A.I.-generated fakery in ways large and small this midterm season — part of a wave of videos powered by artificial intelligence that have flooded the internet and television screens.

Candidates and political action groups, mostly tied to Republicans, have rushed to adopt the technology, spending more than $137 million to promote such ads this year, the researchers found.

“I think what we’re seeing with A.I. has surprised even us,” said Erika Franklin Fowler, a professor at Wesleyan University and the co-director of the Wesleyan Media Project. “A.I. can be used in so many different ways that it creates new opportunities for advertising. Some of the ways in which A.I. is used, honestly, if there wasn’t a disclaimer on the ad, it would be hard to know that A.I. was there.”…

More than 80 percent of the ads were produced by Republican campaigns or Republican-aligned political action committees. Using A.I. has allowed them to make their opponents appear alongside polarizing figures in the Democratic Party, such as Hillary Clinton or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

In one ad from Make Oklahoma Great Again, the Democratic candidate for governor was shown embracing Mrs. Clinton, cheek-to-cheek and hand-in-hand. “Clinton Lover. Trump Hater,” the on-screen text read as President Trump sulked to the side. There was no disclosure that it was A.I.-made. The group spent more than $200,000 promoting the ad on television programming in Oklahoma, according to the media tracker AdImpact…..