AI Political Videos Tell Us Too Much About The People Behind Them

One of the desperate arguments for AI is that it will help people be creative without all the practice and hard work that goes into actually creating something–that, as science fiction writer Ted Chiang wrote at The New Yorker last year, “art can be all inspiration and no perspiration.” A world where whatever enters your head can be immediately externalized is already one of the best reasons for deleting all your social media accounts, but lately we’ve seen politicians use generative AI to show us the unfettered horrors of their brains, and completely remove the wall between them, their cruelty, and the rest of us.

Donald Trump is of course a fan, creating AI videos that mock Democratic leaders and, after last weekend’s No Kings protests, depict him dumping shit on protestors from a fighter jet. Vice President JD Vance called the Democrat videos “funny” and told reporters they would stop if Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer and House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries did what Republicans wanted; Speaker Mike Johnson called the plane shit video “satire” and praised Trump for using “social media to make the point. You can argue he’s probably the most effective person who’s ever used social media for that.”

Lately, NYC mayoral candidate Andrew Cuomo has gotten into the AI game, saying during the first of NYC’s two mayoral debates last week that one his takeaways from his rout in the primary was that he “did not do enough on social media” compared to his opponent and front runner Zohran Mamdani. On October 1 he released a partially AI video of himself doing jobs he doesn’t actually do, like window washer and stage hand. This week, he released an utterly bizarre AI-generated smear ad against Mamdani, a riff on Austin Powers’ Mini-Me that compares Mamdani to former NYC mayor Bill de Blasio. “There’s no such thing as talent; socialism means we’re all equally dumb!” a squeaky-voiced rendering of Mamdani cheers, while fake de Blasio looks everywhere but at the viewer as if even he knows how dumb this is.

This ad is off-putting and desperate and dated, but at least its contents just feel like an off-putting and desperate and dated political ad from Cuomo, a man who is himself all of those things. The same can’t be said of another AI video reportedly uploaded and then deleted by the official Cuomo Twitter account during last night’s debate. Shared by Zeteo reporter Prem Thakker, the over two minute video shows various AI-rendered people identifying themselves as “criminals for Zohran” and celebrating the idea that he’ll make their crimes–which include shoplifting, drunk driving, and domestic abuse–legal. 

The video starts with an AI-generated Mamdani frollicking through NYC’s streets and eating rice with his hands, and then continues to be awful: a guy who looks a lot like Idris Elba puts on a medical mask and keffiyeh before shoplifting from a pharmacy; a cliche 1970s movie pimp stands before a windowless van full of presumably sex-trafficked women. In a nod to equality, I guess, white people are also portrayed as criminals, with an old lady driving around drinking out of a paper bag before crashing her car, and a scene where a woman with a name tag that says “social worker” encourages a man it’s suggested is beating his wife to take deep breaths to “kumbaya the situation.” “Globalize the intifada,” one of Cuomo’s favorite phrases to hurl against Mamdani, makes an appearance as pro-Palestinian protestors burn an American flag. Because it’s AI, several of these offensive, NYC scaremongering stereotypes become different people through the course of the ad; the old lady, the pimp, and Idris Elba all look younger at points. But even if AI can’t even give us consistent characters to follow along on their crime sprees, the essential message comes through: New York is full of bad guys, and if Mamdani becomes mayor, those bad guys will burn the city to the ground, as seen in the last shot of the video.

This would be an appalling ad even if it featured real actors and locations, but I suppose you could argue it would have created some local jobs and thus contributed to the economy Cuomo wants his hands on. But as AI, with all the technology’s wobbles and flaws and weird lighting, it lays bare exactly how stupid Cuomo thinks voters are–that we are so weak and terrified that we would take this message seriously no matter the grubby package it comes in. This isn’t a surprise coming from the angry, self-righteous man we’ve seen on the campaign trail, one whose supporters considered trying to freak us out with an altered image of Mamdani with a thicker beard. 

We already know this about AI, that its boosters think we will guzzle any slop they feed us simply because they are the ones feeding it to us. But these AI posts reveal less about the general population’s tastes and insecurities than they do the people making them. With AI providing a direct route from Trump and Cuomo’s brains to our screens, we get an unrestricted tour through their heads. They can show us exactly how angry and afraid they are, without even an actor to try to put a spin on it or a local street corner we can recognize. It’s the kind of stuff you could imagine them dumping out in a therapy session with Cuomo’s fake social worker: I am scared everyone is out to get me, I would like to take a big wet crap on people who are mean to me. Fake de Blasio can’t look us in the eye because AI doesn’t understand eye contact, but it also gives Cuomo’s gross fantasy a sense of shame, like some part of him knows these are not the kinds of thoughts you should shout out in public, like he knows these are not the kinds of emotions that should rule a person’s life. 

There’s a sort of intimacy here that could almost be humanizing. The vulnerability in art made by humans can help us understand why people do the bad things they do, but stripped of craft or the self-reflection required to make something, the videos show them as not just vicious but also lazy, like even expressing their deepest insecurities isn’t worth their own time. AI gives us too much intimacy with these men. It gives them the uncut ability not just to externalize their crap in the limited words of Twitter and Truth Social, where a reader would then have to translate it into their own imagination, but in sound and color and the wavering facsimile of humans, the way they must experience their fantasies when they close their eyes and indulge them. They can show us, effortlessly, exactly what they see in their heads, without anything to get between us and their thoughts. We can live in their brains with all the vivid, inescapable impact that they want to bring to bear on the real world.

Using AI isn’t just a quick way for them to make their videos. It’s another expression of the power they have, and what they’ve turned power into: not just the freedom to shape laws or economics to their desires, but the freedom to be easily and unreservedly their worst selves at all times and make the rest of us live with it. This is in line with the whole AI industry, which is getting forced into our lives whether we want it or not. AI has long stopped being about human welfare or whatever lofty bullshit its creators once claimed to believe, and more about keeping its own expensive con running at all costs. Men like Trump and Cuomo, as hollow and clumsy and selfish as the things AI spits out, are right at home in it.

Update 10/23/25, 2:30pm--In a statement, Cuomo spokesperson Rich Azzopardi said the criminals video was "a draft proposal that was neither finished nor approved, did not go through the normal legal process, and was inadvertently posted by a junior staffer — which is why it was taken down five minutes later."