Hochul said what??? Blakeman AI video may have violated election law

Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman, the Republican nominee for governor, posted an artificial intelligence-generated campaign video that may run afoul of a 2024 law aimed at curbing deceptive political communication. His campaign denied the video violated election law, but added a disclaimer about AI after City & State inquired anyway.

On Friday, Blakeman posted a video meant to criticize Gov. Kathy Hochul and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani over green energy mandates. The AI video was in the style of the raunchy adult cartoon South Park that included a fictionalized Hochul and Mamdani at an angry town hall. “Higher utility costs are actually a good thing because they encourage behavior change,” Mamdani says. “The transition may cause temporary hardship,” Hochul later chimed in. 

The voices sound like the two elected officials. But they never said those words – the video recreated their voices through AI. And when Blakeman originally posted the video on social media, it didn’t include a disclaimer that it was created with AI or otherwise manipulated.

As part of the state budget in 2024, Hochul and lawmakers included a provision to update the state’s election law regarding deceptive media to include a provision about artificial intelligence. Under the law, “materially deceptive media” includes “any technological representation of speech or conduct” created or modified “by or with software, machine learning, artificial intelligence or any other computer-generated or technological means.” Such media requires a disclaimer that the audio, video and/or images have been manipulated.

The law includes exceptions, including for parody or satire. After City & State inquired about the video, Blakeman spokesperson Madison Spanodemos said that exception applied to the campaign’s video. “This video is satire and requires no legal disclaimer,” she said in a statement. "We’ve added one anyway because, unlike Kathy Hochul, we have absolutely nothing to hide.” The campaign updated the post on X to include the tag “Made with AI,” though the disclaimer still does not appear in the video itself as described in state law. 

The election law provision is still fairly new and remains untested, so a judge would need to determine whether the video violated the statute. But election attorney Sarah Steiner told City & State one cannot simply add a label of parody to something controversial. She said that avid political observers may be able to recognize that Hochul and Mamdani never said what they did in the video, but the average viewer could reasonably believe it’s legitimate audio used in the animated video. “If you have to be that discerning to understand that it isn't real, forget whether we're calling it satire or not, that's misleading,” Steiner said. “It's just misleading.”

According to Peter Loge, director of the Project on Ethics in Political Communication at George Washington University, the question raised by the Blakeman video and its portrayal of the two New York executives has less to do with whether media was created or altered using AI and more to do with with the deceptive nature of such media. “The means of deception matters less than the deception itself,” he said in an email to City & State. “The ad doesn't have any proof the governor or mayor said those things, which should raise questions among voters.”

But Loge added that the attention given to AI muddies the waters. “If everyone thinks everything they don't like is AI generated, but that everything they like is true, then we can't have the honest conversations that democracy relies on,” he said.

The state Democratic Party criticized Blakeman in a statement to City & State. “It’s obvious why Bruce Blakeman’s campaign is centered around lying and faking: his Trump-first MAGA agenda is toxic, and he knows it,” said state Democratic Party spokesperson Addison Dick. “AI slop cartoons about your opponent, comparing Trump to your wife, hiring an armed MAGA militia in your backyard – give it a rest, Bruce. Please.”