{"id":744330,"date":"2026-06-18T05:44:18","date_gmt":"2026-06-18T05:44:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/744330\/"},"modified":"2026-06-18T05:44:18","modified_gmt":"2026-06-18T05:44:18","slug":"canada-has-entered-a-new-era-of-ai-in-political-ads-we-will-survive","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/744330\/","title":{"rendered":"Canada has entered a new era of AI in political ads. We will survive"},"content":{"rendered":"

Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n

Political parties no longer need to go through the myriad of steps it takes to produce a conventional video \u2013 AI essentially turns a concept into a product almost instantly.ALY SONG\/Reuters<\/p>\n

Nearly 65 years ago, a columnist in this newspaper warned readers about the perils that a new technological tool for campaigning would bring to Canadian democracy. <\/p>\n

\u201cNext to the outcome, the most intriguing unknown element in the current federal election campaign is the extent to which the result will be influenced by television electioneering,\u201d Dennis Braithwaite wrote in The Globe and Mail in the spring of 1962. For the first time, he noted, parties would be able to buy network time. They were no longer limited to showing their leader reciting a speech, but instead, could show the candidate engaged in everyday campaign activities. <\/p>\n

\u201cThough a demonstrably powerful means of spreading political propaganda, TV can be treacherous and must be used with extreme caution,\u201d Mr. Braithwaite wrote. <\/p>\n

Regulators would continue to draft and refine rules for televised political advertisements over the next couple of decades, but the public would serve as the primary check on the actual content of political advertising, especially when it crossed ethical lines. The best example of that was the 1993 Progressive Conservative ad that zoomed in on Jean Chr\u00e9tien\u2019s facial paralysis while asking, \u201cIs this a Prime Minister?\u201d The public rejected that ad, with good reason. <\/p>\n

\u2018It feels dystopian:\u2019 AI-generated content about federal election flooded online news void<\/a><\/p>\n

Canada is now on the precipice of an entirely new era of political messaging thanks to the rapid development of generative AI, which allows users to create professional-looking videos quickly and cheaply. Political parties no longer need to find or pay actors or post-production staff, license b-roll, or go through the myriad of other steps it takes to produce a conventional video. AI essentially turns a concept into a product almost instantly, for next to nothing. <\/p>\n

The Conservative Party tested this out with a video responding to the news that Canada was in a \u201ctechnical recession.\u201d The video<\/a> began with a clip from an actual news report, then switched to an AI-created scene of a couple in a food bank lineup where one says, \u201cWe haven\u2019t eaten today,\u201d and the other responds, \u201cYeah, we\u2019re only technically hungry.\u201d Next, we see a family where the dad comes in the house and says, \u201cI got laid off today,\u201d to which his son replies, \u201cDon\u2019t worry daddy, you\u2019re only technically unemployed.\u201d<\/p>\n

It goes on like this. Those who are familiar with AI will be able to recognize it as such instantly, but the scenes are nevertheless labelled as \u201cAI Generated\u201d in the bottom right corner. <\/p>\n

There are lots of things to dislike about this kind of AI slop: It\u2019s lazy, easy, it looks tacky, and replaces actors (or in this case, the voices of actual Canadians struggling to get by) with artificial humans. But these aren\u2019t good enough reasons to reject the use of AI in political messaging outright. Indeed, the greater risk of AI in political ads, especially as the technology gets better, is that the public won\u2019t be able to decipher between what is real and what is not, as well as the harms created by deepfake manipulations of people\u2019s bodies or voices. Those risks necessitate clear rules about how generative AI can be used in political messaging. <\/p>\n

Editorial Board: Ottawa must move urgently to ban nude deepfakes<\/a><\/p>\n

Other jurisdictions are ahead of us in this regard. A number of U.S. states have already passed laws regulating the use of AI in political ads, most of which involve rules on clear disclosure. Some have gone further: Minnesota, for example, passed a law in 2023 banning the use of deepfakes to influence a political campaign, but the strength of that law is now being tested with an attack ad against U.S. Senate candidate Lieutenant Governor Peggy Flanagan, which shows an image<\/a> of her that some might consider a deepfake. <\/p>\n

More obvious examples of deepfakes include one recently published by a pro-Trump PAC called \u201cCitizens for Sanity,\u201d which shows<\/a> Texas Democratic Senate nominee James Talarico in a dress, singing about trans children to the tune of My Favorite Things from The Sound of Music. Texas has laws requiring disclosure<\/a> of AI-generated content in political ads and prohibiting deepfakes intended to influence elections under certain conditions, but one of those conditions is that the ad is published within 30 days<\/a> of an election. The Senate race is still months away. <\/p>\n

Among the changes to the Canada Elections Act proposed under Bill C-25 is a ban on deepfakes with the intention to mislead. It\u2019s a good step. And it\u2019s a necessary step, considering that there is no way to turn back the clock on this new era, or to outright reject<\/a> the use of AI in political ads. We adjusted to the normalization of political television ads 65 years ago, and with the right safeguards in place, we will adjust to this too. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Open this photo in gallery: Political parties no longer need to go through the myriad of steps it…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":744331,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[62,276,277,49,48,20754,5152,927,61],"class_list":["post-744330","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-column","tag-dei","tag-opinion","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/744330","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=744330"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/744330\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/744331"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=744330"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=744330"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=744330"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}