Etzioni on AI: $137M spent on AI-generated midterm ads, and most voters can’t spot the fakes

AI-generated images from 2026 political ads targeting James Talarico, Mike Mazzei, Peggy Flanagan, Kathy Hochul and Zohran Mamdani. (NRSC; Make Oklahoma Great Again PAC via Oklahoma PBS; North Star Dawn PAC via KSTP; Blakeman for Governor) The midterm elections are around the corner, and campaigns and PACs have already spent more than $137 million to air AI-made ads, including an 85-second video in which Texas Senate candidate James Talarico looks into the camera, reads his old tweets aloud, and voices spicy commentary he never actually made. The Senate Republicans’ campaign arm produced it. UC Berkeley deepfake expert Hany Farid said most people wouldn’t immediately know it was fake; the “AI GENERATED” tag sits small and faint in a corner. Between now and Nov. 3, any clip of a candidate on your TV or in your feed may be fabricated, and most carry no AI label whatsoever. I’ve been predicting a deluge of deepfakes, and fear that it will get worse if we don’t act. James Talarico, in his own words: pic.twitter.com/lDlUoqBbP7 — Senate Republicans (@NRSC) March 11, 2026 In 2024, I donated a year of my life to fighting political deepfakes by founding the nonprofit TrueMedia.org. A talented team at TrueMedia.org developed a state-of-the-art deepfake detector in record time and distributed it broadly, free of charge. It analyzed more than 60,000 images, videos and audio clips in elections worldwide, but it was early. The Wesleyan Media Project, which reported the $137 million figure, found less than $50,000 in AI ad spending for the entire 2024 cycle. In January 2025, I said , “It did not materialize in 2024. That doesn’t mean that it’s not coming.” We open-sourced the technology and transferred it to Georgetown University, which resurrected TrueMedia.org in time for the peak of the current election cycle. I was expecting foreign operatives to be the most prolific fakers. But in 2026, the deepfakes are coming from American campaigns and PACs, on television and in your feeds. Many of the AI ads the Wesleyan Media Project has cataloged are harmless. Some are cosmetic: a still photo of Oklahoma candidate Chip Keating animated into a smile, or a synthetic family at a kitchen table where a campaign used to buy stock footage. Fred Davis, who has made campaign ads for 50 years, told The New York Times a scene that would have cost $2 million to shoot now costs about $200,000 to generate. Nobody is deceived. Others are absurd on their face: New York’s governor and …