Democratic state Rep. James Talarico today characterized campaign ads using AI-generated videos of him as \u201clies\u201d and asserted that voters are \u201cfed up\u201d with them, one day after his opponent in Texas\u2019 Senate race posted a deepfake video of him.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey are lying about a candidate in this race, and so I think Texans are fed up with these kind of lies in our politics,\u201d Talarico said in an interview with NBC News in Dallas. \u201cThey want elected leaders who are going to shoot straight with them about their record and about what they\u2019re going to do for the people of Texas, and so these AI deepfake ads don\u2019t add anything to our civic discourse.\u201d<\/p>\n
In a video state Attorney General Ken Paxton\u2019s campaign released yesterday, which The Texas Tribune reported<\/a> will air on Newsmax this week, Talarico is depicted writing with a crayon in a \u201cKing James Talarico\u201d bible with audio clips of separate remarks he has made in the past about gender and feminism but spliced together without context.<\/p>\n It\u2019s not the first time Republicans have posted deepfake videos of Talarico. In March, shortly after he won the Democratic nomination for the Senate, the National Republican Senatorial Committee posted a video<\/a> of an AI-generated Talarico reading excerpts of previous posts of his on X.<\/p>\n At the time, a spokesperson for Talarico told CNN<\/a> that Republicans were \u201cscared\u201d of him. \u201cWhile they spend their time making deepfake AI videos to mislead Texans, we are uniting the people of Texas to win in November,\u201d the spokesperson said.<\/p>\n