The National Republican Senatorial Committee created and posted an AI-generated deepfake video of Senator Chuck Schumer using his real words but fabricated footage, marking a new boundary in political attack advertising.
On Friday, the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) posted a 30-second AI-generated deepfake video of Democratic Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer on X and YouTube. The video shows an AI-generated version of Schumer repeatedly saying 'Every day gets better for us' while grinning, referring to the government shutdown. While these were Schumer's actual words from an October 9 interview with Punchbowl News, the original story only included text, not video or audio. The NRSC created synthetic video footage to visualize the quote. The video includes a small transparent watermark with the NRSC logo and 'AI GENERATED' text in the bottom right corner, and YouTube added an 'Altered or synthetic content' label. The video was captioned 'Week 3 of the Schumer Shutdown: Every day gets better for us' and concludes with a narrator saying 'The Schumer shutdown is making things worse across America and Democrats love it.' The deepfake raised alarms among observers and journalists, including those from right-leaning publications, who warned it crossed a new boundary in politics. This represents the first time the NRSC has used AI to create fake video of an opponent, though Republicans have previously used easily identifiable AI-generated content featuring Schumer and other Democrats.
Domain classification, causal taxonomy, severity scores, and national security assessments were LLM-classified and may contain errors.
Using AI systems to conduct large-scale disinformation campaigns, malicious surveillance, or targeted and sophisticated automated censorship and propaganda, with the aim of manipulating political processes, public opinion, and behavior.
Human
Due to a decision or action made by humans
Intentional
Due to an expected outcome from pursuing a goal
Post-deployment
Occurring after the AI model has been trained and deployed
No population impact data reported.