The Hollywood sign is ablaze as Spencer Pratt, the reality TV star now running for mayor of Los Angeles, suits up as Batman, enters City Hall and leads the people to overthrow a cabal of corrupt, out-of-touch progressives intent on destroying the city.
Then he is Luke Skywalker. Dressed in a Jedi robe, he swoops through the city on an Imperial speeder bike, as California Gov. Gavin Newsom (Emperor Palpatine) rebukes incumbent Mayor Karen Bass (Darth Vader) for not burning the city down to the ground in her first term.
“Make sure you finish the job in your second,” Newsom tells Bass with a tilt of the head and a smirk.
“The only thing that can stop us is someone telling the truth,” Bass replies. “As long as they don’t have any hope, the city’s ours.”
Pratt’s fan-generated AI election campaign videos have been praised and mocked, but heavily shared. And some see them as a harbinger of how artificial intelligence could reshape political messaging across the country.
His supporters are far from the first to create AI-generated ads. But political experts say it’s remarkable the degree to which they have used new technology to churn out a stream of outlandish, hyper-cinematic memes, creating buzz around his campaign and his message.
Some warn, however, that as the technology becomes more sophisticated, it will become harder for many people to distinguish between AI and real videos.
“When you’re creating content that is not based in reality, and then platforms are amplifying it in order to attract more eyeballs, you are putting a burden on the public for figuring out what is real and what is factual, and what is fake and misleading,” said Mark Jablonowski, the chief executive of DSPolitical, a progressive advertising firm.
Pratt’s campaign did not create the viral AI videos depicting him as a superhero taking on a cast of California Democratic villains. But he has shared the ads crafted by AI filmmaker Charlie Curran, founder of L.A.’s Menace Studio.
Supercharged and Hollywood inspired, the videos represent a brazen new era of fan-generated AI in political campaign advertising. Deploying generative AI tools to clone human voices and images, they bolster a hyperbolic and ultra-conspiratorial political narrative that depicts L.A. under Democratic rule as a hellscape in which Newsom and Bass deliberately conspire to harm the people.
Bass has condemned the ads, describing them as “very scary” and “absolutely 150% fiction.”
“His social media is now taking on a violent turn,” Bass told CNN, citing the Batman ad that depicts Angelenos pelting her with tomatoes.
Some political experts dismiss such fears of AI campaign ads as overblown. Most AI videos shared by political campaigns and their fans, they note, are more comedic than deliberately misleading.
“Spencer Pratt is using AI the way it should be used, which is to sharpen reality,” said Matt Klink, an L.A.-based Republican political consultant. “His whole shtick is that Los Angeles is broken, the insiders have failed, and the political class wants to explain away what voters are seeing with their own eyes.”
“Obviously, you don’t run an AI ad where you have someone saying something that they didn’t say, and you should disclose that they’re generated by AI,” Klink noted. But when it comes to ads that depict Pratt as Batman or Luke Skywalker, he said, “if you don’t know that they’re AI generated, you’re pretty clueless to begin with.”
For as long as political candidates and their supporters have experimented with new technology — from the pamphlets of the 1600s to the memes of the 21st century — they have faced complaints that they mislead the public.
As large language models ushered in a new era of AI, Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) warned in 2024 that “a deluge of deception, disinformation and deepfakes are about to descend on the American public.”
The term “deepfake” was first coined in 2017 by a Reddit user who used open-source face-swapping technology to splice celebrity faces onto porn performers’ bodies. Within months, it entered the mainstream lexicon as a way to describe any AI-generated synthetic media that realistically clones a person’s image or voice.
Blumenthal cited a “chilling example.” In January 2024, Republicans placed robo calls using an AI “deepfake” voice mimicking President Biden to New Hampshire residents to discourage Democrats from voting in the presidential primaries.
New Hampshire authorities said the message violated the state’s voter suppression laws. A month later, the Federal Communications Commission outlawed robocalls that use voices generated by AI. The company that sent the messages agreed to pay a $1-million fine.
But others kept pushing the boundaries of AI — mostly as overt parody or satire, an arena that offers greater 1st Amendment protection.
In July 2024, an AI content creator created a mock campaign ad of Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris with a computer-generated voiceover to make it seem she was describing herself as the ultimate “diversity hire” and “deep state puppet.” The post was titled ‘Kamala Harris Campaign Ad PARODY.’
Newsom slammed the post, saying on X, “Manipulating a voice in an ‘ad’ like this one should be illegal.” Two months later, he signed into law a series of bills that clamped down on AI in politics.
But a federal judge blocked one of the new laws that regulated election-related content that is “materially deceptive,” saying it probably violated the 1st Amendment.
No comprehensive federal rules govern the use of AI content in political ads or messaging. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, 29 states have passed laws restricting the use of deepfakes in political campaigns: Some states, such as Texas and Minnesota, prohibit the use of deepfakes a certain number of days before an election; the other 27 states require a media disclosure if content contains a deepfake.
Some political advertising experts call for more federal regulation. The state-by-state patchwork of regulations, they argue, makes it very difficult for social media platforms to be compliant.
“At the end of the day, we really need to see platforms being more responsible with the content that they’re sharing,” Jablonowski said. “We need to have clear guidelines and a level playing field across the country, so we’re not in a position where what’s OK in one state is not OK in another.”
Pratt’s embrace of AI is part of a larger 2026 political trend.
In January, Texas Atty. Gen. Ken Paxton released an ad depicting two of his opponents for a Senate seat — Republican Sen. John Cornyn and Democratic Rep. Jasmine Crockett — waltzing and swinging. A few months later, the National Republican Senatorial Committee shared a video that used a manipulated image of James Talarico, the Democratic nominee for the Texas Senate seat, mouthing his own tweets.
But Pratt has been particularly successful in using fan-based AI to help garner attention, pulling in a number of content creators to craft AI videos for his campaign.
One posted a video parody of the 2004 Downfall film, portraying Bass as Hitler. Another created an animated video, geared to a Latino audience, showing Angelenos lining the streets to cheer as Pratt wheels a garbage can piled with trash and the incumbent mayor. The slogan “SPENCER, SACA LA BASSURA” [Spencer, take out the trash] flashes atop the screen.
A recent survey from the American Assn. of Political Consultants shows that AI adoption is growing rapidly among political consultants — and Republicans are more likely to use it than Democrats.
But political observers in L.A. note that leading Democrats in the mayoral race are unlikely to follow Pratt in using AI. Bass, they note, is a more cautious political figure than Pratt, a brash online influencer who relished playing the role of villain on MTV’s “The Hills.”
While Pratt’s user-generated AI ads have inspired giddy delight from out-of-state Republicans — conservative radio host Buck Sexton praised the Batman video for ushering in “a new era of online persuasion” — it’s still not clear if they will convince Angelenos to vote for him.
Certainly, the ads have helped Pratt gain recognition. They have also given voice to a groundswell of frustration with L.A.’s Democratic establishment and created space for more pressing debate on the future direction of the city.
But there is little evidence that the AI ads, in themselves, are persuading new voters.
So far, none of the AI ads that Pratt has shared have received as many views on his X account as a non-AI ad his campaign produced that has racked up more than 14 million views.
In it, Pratt stands outside Bass’ city-owned Hancock Park mansion and Nithya Raman’s home in leafy Silver Lake, then pans to an Airstream on the charred ruins of his own home, which burnt down during the Palisades fire.
“They don’t have to live in the mess they’ve created,” Pratt says as he walks down an L.A. street littered with homeless tents.
Meghan Daum, a former Los Angeles Times columnist who has endorsed Pratt and dubs herself a self-appointed “liberal elite whisperer for Pratt,” said she thought Pratt’s Airstream ad was more effective than the AI superhero ads. She voiced concern his sharing of AI videos could actively undermine his campaign.
“They will be repellent to the undecided voters Pratt needs to catch, most of whom will think they’re coming directly from the campaign,” she said on X. “Get smarter, guys.”
Using AI, she told The Times, could turn off voters in a town where so many film workers have lost jobs to AI. She also worried about the legality of ads — such as one video purporting to be a Bass campaign ad — that put words in the mouth of computer-generated politicians.
But Daum noted that others told her this was the aesthetic of the new world and a way of getting people who have not voted in the past excited about something.
“That may be true,” she said.
So far, there is little evidence that AI in U.S. political campaigns has affected elections.
“There’s a lot more fear about the effects of AI in politics than evidence of the effects of AI in politics,” said Brendan Nyhan, a political scientist at Dartmouth College who co-authored a recent report on AI and persuasion.
During the 2024 election, Nyhan noted, AI was frequently used to create “obviously false” images of attention-grabbing, funny or raging content. “It seems to be more of a mechanism for reaching your base,” he said, “rather than persuading voters who haven’t made up their mind or might stay home.”
Ultimately, Pratt’s personal story of loss — and more specific complaints about L.A.’s systemic failures in preparedness and emergency response during the 2025 firestorms and spending on unsuccessful programs to house the homeless — may resonate more than simplistic AI stories of evil Democrats hellbent on razing their city.
Some L.A. political observers admit they were surprised by Pratt’s performance in a May 6 televised debate with Bass and Raman.
”Spencer Pratt was kind of a laughingstock when he first announced that he was going to run, and he has dramatically exceeded expectations,” said Klink, the GOP strategist. “I think that he surprised people in his ability to come up with solutions. … That’s what’s going to convince people to vote, not the Batman or Star Wars ad.”
As millions of people click on Pratt videos — in some cases more than the 3.8 million people living in L.A. — Klick said there was one question Pratt needs to be asking: “Do views of his ads translate into votes?”
