SPENCER PRATT ISSUES A CHALLENGE IN LA MAYORAL DEBATE THAT NITHYA RAMAN WILL NEVER ACCEPT. “Last night, Pratt called Raman out on her alleged expertise about the homeless, issuing a challenge to her that she will never accept. Watch:”
“They’re a team:”
Related: Can AI make Spencer Pratt mayor?
It cannot really be said that videos like these lower the tone of public life. Traditional political broadcasts are already awful and people go to great lengths to avoid seeing them. The most famous spot of the 1960s showed a little girl being blown up by a nuclear bomb. AI videos are effective in politics for the trivial reason that you can create whatever scenarios you like for rhetorical purposes. In Curran’s clip Kamala Harris is drinking vodka straight from the bottle, and Mayor Bass has her face made up like the Joker – in a pre-AI age the only way to depict this would be to animate it, which would take much too long. “Storytelling” is meant to be the secret to political communications and AI lets one do this in a much more literal sense. Donald Trump’s famous 2024 ad told viewers that “Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you,” but here Gavin Newsom is simply made to say that “if you were a transgender migrant I could get you a free pussy.”
No doubt the medium has its limits, some of which we can see in the video. AI-generated images and videos tend towards the style of Thomas Kinkade: every surface glistens too much, every shadow is too accented, everything seems to glow with a sort of insane light. In Curran’s video the wood-paneled walls of the dining room look like they have been covered with ten coats of varnish. The effect is dense and headache inducing; combined with the human voices that AI tends to generate, which are best described as a monotone bellow, it is easy to see how these kinds of ads could become exhausting to watch if overused – just as the spots showing a candidate dressed in plaid petting a friendly Labrador have become exhausting. It is perhaps telling that Trump, the master of all mediums, only uses AI for jokes rather than for actual communiques to the public.
I’d say “we’re witnessing the future of political advertisements,” but that future, for better or worse, is now here:
More:
Tweet continues, “in 2017, [Raman] ran for city council in 2019 on a ‘fix homelessness,’ promptly firehosed infinite taxpayer cash at other ‘homeless non-profits,’ and now suddenly says ‘it’s not okay for people to be sleeping on the streets.’ ‘We can fix this’? Yeah, we can, if the ‘we’ doesn’t include you.”
