More than $80M spent on 164 AI-generated political ads this US cycle, per Wesleyan Media Project

Al Jazeera reported on 9 October 2026, in a piece by Saumya Roy, that candidates and their backers have spent more than $80 million on over 164 AI-based advertisements this cycle, citing the Wesleyan Media Project, and that Republicans and their backers were behind about 80 percent of them.

The article describes ads that depict real, identifiable people who did not appear in them: Republican New York gubernatorial candidate Bruce Blakeman released AI-made ads showing New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Governor Kathy Hochul apparently gardening together, and another showing Hochul discussing toll and fare increases. Other examples cited include Ohio Senate Democrat Sherrod Brown, Texas Senate Democrat James Talarico and Michigan Senate Republican Mike Rogers. Blakeman's ads carry an AI disclaimer for a few seconds at the start and he framed them as satire; the New York Democratic Party filed a complaint with the state board of elections arguing the ads violate disclosure rules. In San Francisco, Scott Wiener released an AI chatbot that answered about 5,000 questions parodying opponent Connie Chan's record, accent and naturalised citizenship, then withdrew it, saying it "missed the mark". Scott Babwah Brennen of the NYU Center on Technology Policy described the genre as "slopaganda" — low-quality, identifiably fake AI ads used for persuasion — and said such ads can shape perceptions of a candidate's character. The article states there is no federal law regulating AI deepfake ads and that 31 states require AI-made ads to be labelled.

Why it matters for digital humans: This is the first spending figure large enough to treat political advertising as a real demand channel for synthetic likeness work, and it is worth being clear-eyed about which kind. The ads described are deliberately, visibly fake — the persuasion does not depend on the avatar passing as real, which is the opposite of what the enterprise market optimises for. The $80 million and 164-ad counts are the Wesleyan Media Project's, by its own methodology, and a cycle total is not an annual run rate. The disclosure complaint against Blakeman is the detail to watch: a few seconds of disclaimer at the head of a clip is exactly the kind of compliance shortcut that the newer state and EU labelling regimes were written to close.