Every campaign wants an ad that hits hard, and artificial intelligence makes that easier than ever. Spencer Pratt proved how effective it could be with his ads during his Los Angeles mayoral campaign. But sometimes, some lines shouldn’t be crossed, even though we can all tell when the visuals in an ad are AI-generated,
However, AI is getting so good that it will soon be nearly impossible to tell real footage from fake, and that slippery slope should worry everybody in politics. A month ago, I warned about where this road leads.
But I also warned about something more immediate.
Last month, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton released a campaign ad against Texas State Rep. James Talarico (D-50th District) built on real, damning quotes. The trouble was the delivery.
NEW AD: James Talarico is weaponizing faith to sell a radical agenda, and he even brags about hating Christianity. pic.twitter.com/Wa2nQ3vsIq
— Attorney General Ken Paxton (@KenPaxtonTX) September 8, 2026
As you can see, every quote is real. He did say "God is nonbinary" and "God is not a Christian," and the ad cites both. He has also claimed there are "six genders," called Jesus "a radical feminist," and described himself as "a Christian who hates Christianity." The presentation of the quotes, however, is fake, completely AI-generated.
I laid out my concern at the time:
The ad is devastating because it's true. Every quote in it is real, cited, and about as damning as political rhetoric gets, though they are spliced together in a way that is clearly done for dramatic purposes. The way Paxton chose to deliver those quotes should give conservatives pause, not because of what's being said, but because of how it's being shown.
But as I said at the time, it still rubbed me the wrong way, because “Paxton didn't need a synthetic Talarico. The real Talarico said every one of these things, and we have the footage to prove it.”
It came down to a simple question: ”If the real audio and video already exist, why manufacture a replacement at all?"
Now, no one is confusing the footage as something real. But using AI in a campaign video this way is problematic, because it opens your campaign up to a certain kind of criticism, and it hands your opponent an escape hatch he never earned.
I was just proven right.
Talarico has released a campaign ad of his own denying his record and attacking Paxton… and it referenced the AI-generated ad.
"Ken Paxton is lying about my record, even making fake AI videos of me," Talarico says in the ad. "No, I'm not a member of the Chinese Communist Party. No, I don't support sex change surgeries for kids. I don't have to use AI. Because the truth about Ken Paxton is bad enough."
That is essentially the exact point I made a month ago — a candidate with a record as damaging as Talarico’s should have to answer for it. Instead, Talarico gets to wave it all away as fakery, lumping real quotes in with a computer-generated video and letting viewers assume the whole thing is invented.
The Paxton ad was humorously done, and I understand why the campaign liked it. But it handed Talarico the line that he didn't have to use AI because "the truth about Ken Paxton is bad enough." Paxton's team wrote that line for him the moment it chose a fake Talarico over the real one.
"Talarico earned every bit of criticism in that ad," I wrote last month. "His own words are damning enough without any embellishment."
That's still true. Using AI gave Talarico a talking point. Using his own words against him is effective, but using real video clips gives him no alibi. Paxton’s campaign should have known that.
