Generative Ai In Political Advertising Brennan Center For Justice

Bonisiwe Shabane

-Dec 6, 2025, 8:11 AM

generative ai in political advertising brennan center for justice

As the 2024 U.S. elections gain momentum, political campaigns and advertising agencies are turning to a new ally, artificial intelligence, to disseminate their messages. This emerging technology presents both risks and potential benefits for the political advertising industry. AI-powered tools can generate new text, images, video, and speech from a single prompt to weave into campaign messages. Political campaigns are already using these tools to create messages for ads and fundraising solicitations. AI software can even compose campaign emails.

Generative AI is poised to redefine modern campaigning, although the exact nature of its influence remains uncertain. However, despite calls for regulation or moratoria in Congress, the Federal Election Commission, and even the political consultants’ trade association, national lawmakers have yet to address the new technology. New AI software products are inexpensive, require almost no training to use, and can generate seemingly limitless content. These tools can support personalized advertising at scale, reducing the need for large digital teams and leveling the playing field for campaigns that lack substantial resources. Yet AI also introduces a novel set of challenges, from a tendency to generate bland and repetitive text to the risk of misleading audiences and amplifying ongoing election misinformation issues. This essay examines ways in which AI — and specifically large language models that generate text — can enhance campaigns’ voter outreach efforts, the cautions that campaigns must exercise when embracing new AI tools,...

We focus primarily on considerations that could influence the decision-making of campaigns themselves. Other essays in this series delve into broader threats to democracy associated with AI use, like the disturbing trend of AI-generated deepfakes in campaigns and AI as a tool for voter suppression, along with... Here, we take a campaign’s-eye view of some of the strengths and weaknesses of generative AI in political advertising and the likely course that the market will take. Throughout history, political campaigns have evolved in tandem with new media platforms, from the rise of radio broadcasting in the 1920s to the proliferation of the internet and social media in the 21st century. In recent years, data analytics and microtargeting tools have become the bedrock of modern campaigning. Campaigns now rely on large data sets that offer detailed insights into citizens’ behaviors, interests, and whereabouts in order to advance their key goals, such as voter mobilization and fundraising.

Yet using this wealth of data to deliver the right message to the right person at the right time demands considerable labor and expertise, as well as precision tools. And this data-driven targeting is not perfect: campaigns sometimes end up delivering the wrong message or targeting the wrong person. AI has the potential to make data-driven tools even more powerful and accessible. From a campaign perspective, AI’s ability to synthesize information about a target audience and generate a persuasive message tailored to that audience’s interests holds great promise for microtargeting efforts. Free AI tools, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Microsoft’s Bing, and Google’s Bard, are each capable of producing relevant, comprehensive, and sophisticated marketing copy for a target audience. What’s more, such tools can accomplish this task on a massive scale.

AI can fine-tune messages for a diverse array of voter groups and their subgroups, and it can execute these refinements hundreds if not thousands of times daily. The early 2020s will likely be remembered as the beginning of the deepfake era in elections. Generative artificial intelligence now has the capability to convincingly imitate elected leaders and other public figures. AI tools can synthesize audio in any person’s voice and generate realistic images and videos of almost anyone doing anything — content that can then be amplified using other AI tools, like chatbots. The proliferation of deepfakes and similar content poses particular challenges to the functioning of democracies because such communications can deprive the public of the accurate information it needs to make informed decisions in elections. Recent months have seen deepfakes used repeatedly to deceive the public about statements and actions taken by political leaders.

Specious content can be especially dangerous in the lead-up to an election, when time is short to debunk it before voters go to the polls. In the days before Slovakia’s October 2023 election, deepfake audio recordings that seemed to depict Michal Šimečka, leader of the pro-Western Progressive Slovakia party, talking about rigging the election and doubling the price of... Other deepfake audios that made the rounds just before the election included disclaimers that they were generated by AI, but the disclaimers did not appear until 15 seconds into the 20-second clips. At least one researcher has argued that this timing was a deliberate attempt to deceive listeners. Šimečka’s party ended up losing a close election to the pro-Kremlin opposition, and some commenters speculated that these late-circulating deepfakes affected the final vote. In the United States, the 2024 election is still a year away, but Republican primary candidates are already using AI in campaign advertisements.

Most famously, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s campaign released AI-generated images of former President Donald Trump embracing Anthony Fauci, who has become a lightning rod among Republican primary voters because of the Covid-19 mitigation policies he advocated. Given the astonishing speed at which deepfakes and other synthetic media (that is, media created or modified by automated means, including with AI) have developed over just the past year, we can expect even... In response to this evolving threat, members of Congress and state legislators across the country have proposed legislation to regulate AI. The year 2024 began with bold predictions about how the United States would see its first artificial intelligence (AI) election. 1 Commentators worried that generative AI — a branch of AI that can create new images, audio, video, and text — could produce deepfakes that would so inundate users of social media that they...

2 Meanwhile, some self-labeled techno-optimists proselytized how AI could revolutionize voter outreach and fundraising, thereby leveling the playing field for campaigns that otherwise could not afford expensive political consultants and staff. 3 As the election played out, AI was employed in numerous ways: Foreign adversaries used the technology to augment their election interference by creating copycat news sites filled with what appeared to be AI-generated fake... 4 Campaigns leveraged deepfake technology to convincingly imitate politicians and produce misleading advertisements. 5 Activists deployed AI systems to support voter suppression efforts. 6 Candidates and supporters used AI tools to build political bot networks, translate materials, design eye-catching memes, and assist in voter outreach.

7 And election officials experimented with AI to draft social media content and provide voters with important information like polling locations and hours of operation. 8 Of course, AI likely was also used during this election in ways that have not yet come into focus and may only be revealed months or even years from now. Were the fears and promises overhyped? Yes and no. It would be a stretch to claim that AI transformed U.S. elections last year to either effect, and the worst-case scenarios did not come to pass.

9 But AI did play a role that few could have imagined a mere two years ago, and a review of that role offers some important clues as to how, as the technology becomes... elections — and American democracy more broadly — in the coming years. AI promises to transform how government interacts with and represents its citizens, and how government understands and interprets the will of its people. 10 Revelations that emerge about AI’s applications in 2024 can offer lessons about the guardrails and incentives that must be put in place now — lest even more advanced iterations of the technology be... elections and democratic governance as a whole. This report lays out the Brennan Center’s vision for how policymakers can ensure that AI’s inevitable changes strengthen rather than weaken the open, responsive, accountable, and representative democracy that all Americans deserve.

Now is the time for policymakers at all levels to think deliberately and expansively about how to minimize AI’s dangers and increase its pro-democracy potential. That means more than just passing new laws and regulations that relate directly to election operations. It also includes holding AI developers and tech companies accountable for their products’ capacities to influence how people perceive facts and investing in the resources (including workforces and tools) and audit regimes that will... Policymakers should also establish guardrails for election officials and other public servants that allow them to use AI in ways that improve efficiency, responsiveness, and accountability while not inadvertently falling prey to the technology’s... In the course of writing this article, we have spoken to numerous election officials and security experts about their apprehensions and ambitions regarding generative artificial intelligence. Within the elections community, many officials have expressed grave concerns about what generative AI might mean for election security.

That sentiment aligns with recent media discourse highlighting the dangers posed by AI. An illustrative May 2023 article in the Washington Post described an increase in phishing attacks attributed to AI, noting that such attacks are “just the beginning . . . as attackers use artificial intelligence to write software that can break into . .

. networks in novel ways, change appearance and functionality to beat detection, and smuggle data back out through processes that appear normal.” Other commentaries recount the ways that AI may make it easier to impersonate election officials, offices, and system vendors in order to infiltrate election infrastructure and mislead the public. Meanwhile, some election officials worry that excessive emphasis on AI’s frightening capabilities itself breeds more peril. David Triplett, the elections manager for Ramsey County, Minnesota, wonders if “all this talk about AI’s power is fueling even more paranoia and confusion about the trustworthiness of elections.” Such concerns seem valid given... How much should election offices and vendors worry about the security threats posed by advances in AI, and what steps should they take to prepare for them?

This article is the inaugural piece in a series delving into AI’s potential effects on American democracy. It examines generative AI’s capacity to disrupt the security of election offices and election system vendors. Specifically, we look here at how AI changes (and does not change) the cybersecurity situation for election offices and election infrastructure. We also look at the threat that generative AI poses to the ability of election offices to function as authoritative sources of election information and records. We then detail measures that government, the private sector, and the media must take to guard against AI’s risks and build public confidence in the integrity of election outcomes in the AI age. Later pieces in this series will consider, among other issues, AI’s effects on manipulated media in political advertising, election administration, voter suppression efforts, and the public comment process.

This section looks at how AI will (and won’t) change the election security landscape for election offices and election system vendors. Security experts we interviewed asserted that election offices nationwide can effectively counter AI-related cybersecurity risks leading up to the 2024 elections. These risks mirror those cautioned against over the past two decades. Essential safeguards involve robust cyber hygiene; preempting, identifying, and recovering from breaches; ensuring paper backups of voter choices; and regularly auditing software tabulations. Although many of these measures are already in place across the country thanks to substantial investments in election security, much more needs to be done ahead of 2024. Looking further ahead, experts agree that AI will change how software is engineered.

It can make cyberattacks bigger, quicker, sneakier, and better able to outsmart existing software security tools. But it also holds the promise of new defensive capabilities. As the National Science Foundation’s Jeremy Epstein framed it, AI “is going to have an impact on both the offensive and defensive sides of the game. The net outcome is wildly uncertain.” Generative artificial intelligence is already being deployed to mislead and deceive voters in the 2024 election, making it imperative that voters take steps to identify inauthentic images, audio, video, and other content designed to... While election disinformation has existed throughout our history, generative AI amps up the risks.

It changes the scale and sophistication of digital deception and heralds a new vernacular of technical concepts related to detection and authentication that voters must now grapple with. For instance, early in the generative AI boom in 2023, a cottage industry of articles urged voters to become DIY deepfake detectors, searching for mangled hands and misaligned shadows. But as some generative AI tools outgrew these early flaws and hiccups, such instructions acquired greater potential to mislead would-be sleuths seeking to uncover AI-generated fakes. Other new developments introduce different conundrums for voters. For example, major generative AI and social media companies have begun to attach markers to trace a piece of content’s origins and changes over time. However, major gaps in usage and the ease of removing some markers mean that voters still risk confusion and misdirection.

Generative Ai In Political Advertising Brennan Center For Justice

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