AI竞选广告泛滥，正在侵蚀公众信任

Politicians have long made it hard to trust their words. Now, AI-generated campaign ads flooding the airwaves and social media are making it harder to trust your own eyes and ears. Why it matters: Americans' trust in politicians and institutions has been tanking in recent years — and AI campaign ads could deepen that erosion, political tech experts say. What they're saying: "I think that it is true that Americans are losing faith in elite institutions to tell them what is true and what is not, and AI exacerbates that trend," Nate Persily, co-director of the Stanford Law AI Initiative, tells Axios. "The more artificial media that we consume, the less likely that people will be able to discern what is true from what is false, and also the less that they might care. And that's an important caveat." Driving the news: Texas Senate nominee Ken Paxton recently released a realistic campaign ad targeting Democratic nominee James Talarico that used an AI-generated Talarico to deliver some of his most controversial statements, sometimes stripped of context. The synthetic Talarico combined and repackaged remarks Talarico had made about biological sex, God and Christianity, sometimes stripping them of their original context. The ad was based on real remarks, but it altered some of Talarico's wording while using an AI-generated version of him to deliver them. Between the lines: Paxton's ad lands amid a broader backlash against AI, including increasingly visible fights over data centers. "The one thing that both right and left seem to agree on is that they don't trust AI," Sarah Kreps, the director of Cornell's Tech Policy Institute, tells Axios. "They want authenticity, not AI-generated slop." Kreps notes Paxton may have run an unnecessary risk: "He'd probably be better served just letting the quotes speak for themselves, rather than making it a murky thing where he's risking conflating himself with all this AI backlash." Zoom in: AI can degrade public trust even when people are not deceived. Persily stresses that the main harm from the rise of synthetic media is not that people are fooled by AI-generated content, but that bad actors can dismiss real things as deepfakes. Yes, but: Not all political AI is equally deceptive. A cartoonish ad from Los Angeles mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt reads more like a meme than a deepfake. There is little federal legislation on the matter, while many states require disclosure for potentially deceptive deepfake ads.