Republicans release AI deepfake of James Talarico as phony videos proliferate in midterm races
By Daniel Dale, CNN
(CNN) — Senate Republicans released an online ad this week in which a real-looking but fake version of a Democratic candidate, fabricated with artificial intelligence, appears to speak directly into the camera for more than a minute.
The National Republican Senatorial Committee’s deepfake of James Talarico, the Democratic nominee in the US Senate race in Texas, is only the latest in a series of AI-generated creations from the national GOP campaign organization in the past year. But it’s the first featuring a phony version of a candidate talking in a lifelike manner for so long – an example of how far AI technology has come in a short time and an indicator of the direction attack ads may be heading.
“The face and voice are very good. There is a slight misalignment between audio and video, but otherwise this is hyper-realistic and I don’t think that most people would immediately know it is fake,” Hany Farid, a University of California, Berkeley professor specializing in digital forensics, said in an email.
The use of AI deepfakes in campaign advertising raises a host of ethical questions. It has also prompted some bipartisan calls for federal legislation or regulation on the practice, though those ideas have also faced pushback on First Amendment grounds.
The 85-second ad depicts an AI-created “Talarico” appearing to proudly read excerpts from 2021 tweets in which the real Talarico made statements on transgender issues, race and religion and a 2013 tweet in which he recalled having attended a Planned Parenthood event as a teenager. In addition, the ad depicts the fake “Talarico” making new self-praising comments that there is no evidence the real Talarico actually made – praising the past tweets by “saying” things like “oh, this one is so touching” and “oh, I love this one too.”
The ad begins and ends with a narrator describing it as a “dramatic reading,” and an “AI GENERATED” disclosure appears on screen for almost the entire ad. But the disclosure text is small, mostly faint and confined to a bottom corner of the screen – and the fake “Talarico,” shown wearing a blazer and open-collared shirt, looks uncannily like the actual candidate.
A source familiar with the NRSC’s thinking described AI as a “consistently effective” way to highlight opposing candidates’ statements and said, “These are Talarico’s real words … all we have done is visualize them for voters using a modern tool, within all legal and ethical parameters.” The source, however, said they did not have a comment to offer on the additional “Talarico” commentary the ad appears to have invented.
NRSC communications director Joanna Rodriguez asserted in an email that Democrats are “panicking after hearing James Talarico’s own words.” Talarico campaign spokesperson JT Ennis asserted in a text message that it is the candidates in the ongoing Republican primary who are “scared of James Talarico,” adding, “While they spend their time making deepfake AI videos to mislead Texans, we are uniting the people of Texas to win in November.”
A debate about disclosure
Texas has one of the country’s strictest state laws on political deepfakes, but it only applies in the month prior to an election. A Texas bill passed in 2019 made it a criminal misdemeanor, punishable by up to a year in jail, to create a deepfake video and cause it to be published or distributed within 30 days of an election if it was “created with the intent to deceive” and intended to hurt a candidate or influence the results.
Election Day in the 2026 midterms is in early November, while it’s late May for the Republican primary runoff. And while roughly half of states have passed a law relating to campaign deepfakes, many of the others simply require disclosure when an ad was made with AI. Democratic Sen. Andy Kim of New Jersey responded to the anti-Talarico ad with a call for national action, posting on X: “These deepfakes are dangerous and wrong. We need protections not just for politics, but for all Americans that could be targeted.”
The words “AI GENERATED” appear in small text in the bottom right corner of the anti-Talarico ad, above the NRSC logo, for about three seconds soon after it begins. Then, as the fake “Talarico” speaks, the words “AI GENERATED” appear in fainter and even smaller text in the same corner, staying on the screen for more than a minute. The slightly larger and darker disclosure text reappears for the final five seconds of the ad.
Some previous AI use by political campaigns did not include any disclosure – for example, in 2023, when the Republican presidential campaign of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis posted fake images of President Donald Trump hugging Dr. Anthony Fauci mixed in with real images, or a 2024 robocall scandal in which a consultant working for the Democratic presidential campaign of Rep. Dean Phillips hired someone to create an AI version of President Joe Biden’s voice urging New Hampshire voters not to vote in the primary.
Sarah Kreps, professor and director of the Tech Policy Institute at Cornell University, said the disclosure in the ad against Talarico “reflects the direction the technology and the norms around it seem to be moving.”
“Campaigns seem like they’re starting to treat synthetic media less as something covert – maybe because that backfired as being dishonest and deceptive, not qualities you want to see in elected officials – and more as something that can be used openly as long as viewers are told what they’re seeing,” Kreps said in an email.
It’s debatable, though, whether the small-text disclosure was truly open.
“I don’t think that faint, small font in the bottom righthand corner comes close to appropriate disclosure because the average person doom scrolling on X/YouTube is simply not going to notice — in fact, I didn’t notice when I first looked at the video,” said Farid. “I also think that if the (Talarico) tweets are real, seeing the candidate read them lands differently and can reasonably be categorized as deceptive, and I don’t think that the campaigns or candidates should be opening this Pandora’s box.”
AI fakes have become more common during the 2026 midterms
AI fakery has proliferated during the 2026 midterm cycle as rapid improvements in AI technology have made fake videos more convincing and easier to create than ever.
Texas is a prime example. As The Texas Tribune noted last month, multiple ads and social media posts have employed AI videos and images during the contentious Republican Senate primary involving Sen. John Cornyn and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.
An attack ad from Paxton’s campaign made extensive use of a fake “Cornyn” happily dancing with Democratic Rep. Jasmine Crockett; small text at the end of the ad disclosed that “certain video” in it was AI “satire that does not represent real events.” An ad from Cornyn’s campaign, meanwhile, showed phony clips of unsuccessful Republican candidate Rep. Wesley Hunt holding a Pomeranian in fake scenes to depict Hunt as a mere “show dog”; that ad did not include any AI disclosure.
Various Democrats have used AI, too. California Gov. Gavin Newsom has posted a fictional video showing Trump and top administration officials crying in handcuffs as well as other AI content, though much of it clearly fake and satirical. Crockett’s unsuccessful Senate primary campaign would not answer directly when Texas media asked if an ad’s striking image of Crockett standing with a massive crowd was AI-generated.
The NRSC, like others, sees little downside to deepfakes in ads. Even when some viewers express outrage or news outlets cover the story of a fake, the ad – and the messages the ad is trying to highlight – get more attention. Kreps said synthetic media is “likely to become a routine campaign tool” in both parties.
“What we’re likely seeing is a kind of competitive boundary-pushing: once one campaign demonstrates a tactic, others adopt it rather than risk a perceived disadvantage,” she said.
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