What to make of the new AI election ad created by the filmmaker Charles Curran on behalf of Spencer Pratt, a reality TV star who is running to be Mayor of Los Angeles? The radio host Buck Sexton has already hailed the video as the future of political communication, and Jeb Bush has called it “maybe the best political ad of the year.”
The video, which Pratt did not commission, but did repost on social media, shows California worthies – incumbent Mayor Karen Bass, Gavin Newsom, and Kamala Harris – assembled for a sinister banquet. Victims are brought before them: a mother whose children are being harassed by the city’s homeless, and a prostrate Hugh Jackman, who begs to be allowed to rebuild his house in Pacific Palisades. The day is saved by Pratt, here portrayed as Batman, who beats up uniformed DSA (‘Democratic Socialists of America’) goons and incites a mob of angry citizens to pelt Bass et al with tomatoes. “LA is worth saving,” the video concludes.
The task of opposition has now fallen to offbeat figures like Pratt, with offbeat videos like these
It cannot 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 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 also 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.
The message itself is a good one. Curran portrays the Establishment as a silly ancien regime: the villains in the video are all dressed up like courtiers in Versailles. This is certainly an improvement on his right-wing counterparts in Silicon Valley, who insist on flattering people such as Newsom as “high-status.” Curran and Pratt rightly argue that fraud and theft can explain much of contemporary American society and what ails it. A recent video by Pratt asks why the city had to spend $16 million to build 64 units of “interim housing,” and during an appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast he outlined how $800 million in taxpayer money that was meant to be used to rebuild Pacific Palisades was instead squirreled away into allied NGOs.
There are, apparently, many influential people in California who are unhappy with the way the state is being governed, but time and again they have shown themselves unwilling to act in any sort of concerted way. Even the supposedly all-powerful tech sector is regularly smacked about by local politicians, and is now being forced to decamp to places such as Austin. None of these interests have been a match for the most poxy of municipal Cosa Nostras, represented by Mayor Bass. Little surprise, then, that the task of opposition has now fallen to offbeat figures like Pratt, with offbeat videos like these.
Comments