released the video Sunday<\/a>. It depicts his opponent, Democratic congressional candidate Blake Gendebien, saying things Gendebien never said. The person in the ad looks and sounds just like Gendebien, but it was generated by artificial intelligence.<\/p>\n\u201cMy initial response was, boy, Anthony has nothing to run on, so he\u2019s putting words in my mouth,\u201d Gendebien said.<\/p>\n
Constantino says he created the video in response to an AI video Gendebien\u2019s campaign generated last year attacking Congresswoman Stefanik.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe made it quite a while ago after Blake Gendebien made a sexist video attacking Congresswoman Stefanik, enlarging her feminine attributes. I saw that, and I said disgusting,\u201d Constantino said.<\/p>\n
Even though he did it first, Gendebien claims his use of AI doesn\u2019t go as far as Constantino\u2019s. \u201cOurs was an obvious satire and lighthearted parody,\u201d Gendebien said.<\/p>\n
Despite Gendebien\u2019s frustration, SUNY Plattsburgh professor of political science Harvey Schantz says AI campaign videos like this are fair game in New York. \u201cUnder New York state election law, Constantino has fulfilled his requirements by clearly stating on the top of the ad that this was a generated ad,\u201d Schantz said.<\/p>\n
Which means for now, the First Amendment continues to prevail in the age of the hyper-realistic deepfake.<\/p>\n
Copyright 2026 WCAX. All rights reserved.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"PLATTSBURGH, N.Y. (WCAX) – Mudslinging between two congressional candidates in the race to replace Republican Congresswoman Elise Stefanik…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":320058,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[120674,13244,3250,75029,50468,103332,11454,858,9,11,10,49,51,50,12,1634,1631],"class_list":["post-320057","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york","tag-21st-district","tag-ad","tag-ai","tag-anthony-constantino","tag-artificial-inteligence","tag-blake-gendebien","tag-campaign","tag-congress","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-headlines","tag-new-york-news","tag-new-york-state","tag-new-york-state-headlines","tag-new-york-state-news","tag-news","tag-vermont","tag-wcax"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/320057","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=320057"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/320057\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/320058"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=320057"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=320057"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=320057"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}