Stuart Thompson

Dustin Lloyd, a Democratic primary candidate for Missouri’s state legislature, was a well-known member of his community when he started his political campaign. But there was one important group that didn’t seem to know him at all: A.I. chatbots. If voters quizzed a chatbot like OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini about Mr. Lloyd, they would find only basic information that failed to convey his focus on helping small businesses. Fortunately for Mr. Lloyd, there was a fix. He tweaked his online presence, publishing a Q&A about himself on his campaign website.

Republican and Democratic candidates and strategists who were once wary of A.I. tools or overwhelmed by them are now rushing to give their campaigns an A.I. upgrade. Those who do so could reap the rewards in the midterm elections in November and, ultimately, in the 2028 presidential campaign. Those who don’t could fall far behind.

The era of AI propaganda is here—and President Trump is an enthusiastic participant. After nationwide protests over the weekend against the Trump administration, the president posted an AI-generated video to his Truth Social account depicting himself as a fighter pilot, careening through major cities and dropping excrement on protesters.

Since the explosion of generative artificial intelligence over the last two years, the technology has demeaned or defamed opponents and, for the first time, officials and experts said, begun to have an impact on election results. Free and easy to use, A.I. tools have generated a flood of fake photos and videos of candidates or supporters saying things they did not or appearing in places they were not—all spread with the relative impunity of anonymity online.

California will now require social media companies to moderate the spread of election-related impersonations powered by artificial intelligence, known as “deepfakes,” after Gov Gavin Newsom (D-CA) signed three new laws on the subject on September 17. The three laws, including a first-of-its-kind law that imposes a new requirement on social media platforms, largely deal with banning or labeling deepfakes. Only one of the laws will

The internet was spewing racist and sexist attacks long before Vice President Kamala Harris (D-CA) began her presidential campaign, including when Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton sought the job. Since the last major election, however, it has become even more noxious—and more central to American politics. In 2008, then-Sen Obama (D-IL) Obama faced an ecosystem in which Facebook had millions of users, not billions, and the iPhone was just a year old. In 2016, Clinton’s campaign monitored a handful of social media platforms, not dozens.

Granular surveillance is still new. But some experts argue the window to define our cultural values around tracking citizens may be closing. In the United States, and across the world, any protester who brings a phone to a public demonstration is tracked and that person’s presence at the event is duly recorded in commercial datasets. At the same time, political parties are beginning to collect and purchase phone location for voter persuasion.

The Times Privacy Project obtained a dataset with more than 50 billion location pings from the phones of more than 12 million people in this country.