Amber whiskey crystal decanter, two lowball tumblers, small mirrored tray and gold chain.
Doug Ford Lego minifigure. A puffy, flushed face, sandy blonde combed hair.
Miami Vice meets Etobicoke.
The burgeoning social media influencer has thus created the following scene. gravy plainan AI-generated music video that satirizes Prime Minister Doug Ford’s private jet fiasco.
To the human eye, a 400-word prompt may look like a disjointed mass of text.
But for generative artificial intelligence programs, they are taken as clear instructions on how to create the next frontier in political warfare.
gravy plain The parody video, which featured a catchy country music soundtrack and Doug Ford in Lego form, racked up hundreds of thousands of views on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, X, and Facebook.
It combines criticism of the government’s inaction on jet ownership with hidden Easter eggs and details known only to those who follow Ontario politics, such as the prime minister’s phone ringing off the hook due to a court order to release his cellphone records and a hospital bed in the hallway.
So it may come as a surprise that its creator is a middle-aged man based in Switzerland.
Alex Haught, an Ottawa native who left his job in the restaurant business in Canada to move to Switzerland 25 years ago, now considers himself an AI storyteller.
“I stumbled across this article about buying a $29 million plane, and a few days later they announced they were selling it back, so I thought, ‘This article would be a natural fit for me to write,’ and I’m the one writing this article,” Huot said.
Huot estimates that: Miami Vice meets Etobicoke It took more than a dozen attempts to accurately recreate the scene inside the jet, and the entire project took a week.
“I write text, I write lyrics, and from there I use tools to generate music, images and videos,” Huot said. “It’s a bit of a dance between my ideas and what the AI generates.”
Haught estimates he spends hundreds of dollars in subscription fees to programs like Suno, Nano Banana and Higgsfield to produce his videos, all of which he pays out of pocket.
Huot is adamant that he has not been approached by any political party to create both. gravy plain And the second catchy Ford critique is, FOIbut the video attracted his attention from Queen’s Park.
Ontario NDP Leader Marit Stiles, Ontario Liberal Party interim leader John Fraser and long-term care minister Natalia Ksendova-Bashta are currently among Huot’s followers on Instagram.
Huot also said he was approached by a school board director if he could use the song at a meeting.
“Honestly, it was very humbling for me,” Huot said.
Ebrahim Bagheri, an expert on the responsible use of AI and a professor at the University of Toronto, suggested that AI could level the political playing field.
“Normally you would think about a team creating a video like this,” he said. “Today, AI has enabled just one human [to do all of that].
“Over the next year or so, these tools will probably be democratized to the extent that ordinary people can manipulate and generate these videos in large quantities, at which point they will become competitive.”
Double-edged sword and deepfakes
Bagheri believes that adding generative AI to the campaign battlefield is a double-edged sword.
“A big concern is the authenticity of the content being produced. Anything that uses animation or Lego figures is clearly a creative work and people will immediately understand that.”
“But then you also have deepfakes, where people generate videos of celebrities.”
In early May, the city of Toronto closed the Gardiner Expressway and Don Valley Parkway during a weekend scheduled for the visit of soccer superstar Lionel Messi, three Toronto Blue Jays games, and Mother’s Day.
An organization called IntegrityTO posted a deepfake-style video to X showing Chou saying things he never said about highway closures.
Although parts of the video are satirical in nature and the voice used for the mayor is clearly inaccurate, it appears that just showing the mayor moving his lips to a fake speech at a podium was enough to fool some of X’s comments.
The group insists it was not trying to deceive anyone.
Daniel Tate, executive director of IntegrityTO, likened the video to a newspaper caricature, saying, “I think anyone with any common sense would be able to tell it was AI, because it doesn’t sound like her voice at all.”
“Political cartoons are part of a free and democratic society, so what you’re looking at here are very realistic drawings, and in this case, drawings of robots.”
Reaction to the video was not very positive among both self-identified conservatives and Chow supporters.
“Deepfakes are becoming a serious threat to the health of our society,” Bagheri said.
“This is not just the political system. There are many smaller parts, societal parts, that will be affected by generative AI technology, and the political system is just one of them.”
Stephen Taylor agrees. His company created Flashbulb, a media monitoring AI tool that aggregates content from television, radio, print, and Congressional committees and distills it into an easily digestible format.
“It’s certainly a concern and it’s up to all of us to be educated about what’s out there and how these technologies are being used,” Taylor said.
“It’s not just people making videos about the prime minister and his plane. It could be foreign interference and people trying to manipulate how domestic political issues are viewed from the perspective of an adversary, rather than the typical democratic participation of the domestic population.”
Taylor also believes that AI in campaigning is here to stay, along with other innovative digital tools like Photoshop and search engines.
“Voters and citizens in general will become more familiar with AI,” Taylor said. “They will develop antennae.”
At Queen’s Park, the Ontario Liberal Party introduced a bill to protect against artificially generated malicious content, arguing that the next election could be heavily influenced by AI and that guardrails need to be put in place.
“You can basically do anything, you can make anyone say anything, you can make anyone do anything. That erodes trust,” interim leader John Fraser said. “Suddenly, people don’t know if what they’re seeing is real.”
Despite emphasizing the bipartisan nature of the law, the Progressive Conservative Party rejected it.
So what are the best practices for AI politics in the absence of real rules and laws?
“One of the important things is disclosure,” Bagheri said, adding that another is quality control.
“The responsibility remains [user] Check the validity of AI-generated content yourself. If something goes wrong, you can’t blame the AI model. ”
