generative ai

A parody AI chatbot designed by California congressional candidate Scott Wiener’s campaign to mock the record of his opponent attracted the attention politicians crave and criticism most loathe.

The short-lived experiment stirred controversy over the use of artificial intelligence in campaigns ads and drew sharp criticism from former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who has endorsed Wiener’s opponent for the coveted San Francisco congressional seat. Wiener quickly pulled the plug.

Candidates on both sides of the aisle have been testing the waters by integrating generative AI into campaign ads. It comes as no surprise to political sociologist Mindy Romero, the director of the Center for Inclusive Democracy, who said candidates have long used all tools at their disposal to reach voters, from the invention of the radio and TV to social media.

“Using AI is just part of the progression,” Romero said. Generative AI is particularly useful for political candidates since it allows them to subconsciously influence viewers by putting words in their opponents’ mouths, she said.

Even as political campaigns experiment with more outlandish applications of the technology, many have already been using AI in quieter ways, including to compose tailored mailings and participate in digital chat rooms, Romero said.

GOP gubernatorial candidate Steve Hilton on July 24 released three cinematic ads made using generative AI, the first of which features fictional portrayals of Kamala Harris and Gavin Newsom, shown sharing a lavish meal.

The ad also depicts a fake Xavier Becerra, his Democratic rival in the governor’s race, who is heard saying, “I believe all the things that Newsom believes.” The ad ends with Hilton facing off against a massive red-eyed robot meant to represent the “Democratic machine.” An AI disclaimer appears in the last five seconds of the two-minute and 29-second video.

“Campaigns have always adopted new technology, from television to the internet to social media,” Hilton campaign spokesperson Hector Barajas said in a statement. “Generative AI is the next step, and we believe it would be irresponsible not to use every lawful, ethical, and innovative tool to communicate with California voters.”

Spencer Pratt, who unsuccessfully ran for L.A. mayor, in May reposted on X a viral Batman-inspired AI-generated video that depicted Mayor Karen Bass as the Joker, the clownish supervillain. Charles Curran, the filmmaker who made the fan video in support of Pratt, appears to now be working with Hilton’s campaign in a more official capacity, with his X account tagged on several campaign social media posts.

“I view this as the evolution of political satire,” Curran said, referring to his AI videos, in an interview with the Washington Times. “Like Mark Twain. Like Tammany Hall.” Curran did not respond to interview requests.

“We’re on the bleeding edge right now,” said Sacramento political consultant Tim Rosales, who ran Republican John Cox’s 2018 gubernatorial campaign. He said he anticipates that campaigns will more fully understand and use AI to its full extent in the next two election cycles.

California campaigns have long been at the forefront of adopting new technologies. In the 1980s, the late political strategist Clint Reilly was among the first political consultants to use voter roll data to segment and target pivotal voters for turnout and persuasion.

Rosales said that because campaigns in California are more expensive and raise more money than those in other states, “You have a lot more tools in your tool box and more toys you can play with.”

Lynn Vavreck, a political science and communications studies professor at UCLA, said the persuasive effects of Hilton’s AI videos are likely “limited” as they are most likely being watched by supporters. The videos, she said, are more akin to “content creation” than to ads.

Romero said AI technology can be beneficial for campaigns, particularly those with limited funds, that may use it to create outreach lists, assist with analysis or generate creative and campaign materials.

But AI-generated video, images and audio are a “double-edged sword,” Romero said. While effective at drawing attention, they may have the unwanted effect of making viewers uncomfortable by blurring the lines of reality — even if the AI use is disclosed. As a result, political campaigns must make a “strategic calculation” when they opt to use them, she said.

Those perils surfaced last week when the campaign of Wiener (D-San Francisco), who is running for the congressional seat held by the outgoing Pelosi, unveiled an AI chatbot that could be accessed on the ConnieChan.ai website.

The site referred to itself as “Connie, the world’s first AI trained to say no to anything you ask.” The footer included a note that the site is not affiliated with or endorsed by Chan, is meant as parody, and is paid for by Wiener’s campaign.

“Bring me an idea and I’ll explain why it can’t, shouldn’t, and won’t happen,” the site said, followed by a box encouraging users to type in a query. The chatbot would then produce a snide response parodying Chan.

When The Times entered the word “housing” into the text box last week, its response came seconds later.

“I built my career opposing new housing in San Francisco,” the chatbot’s response read. “I aggressively defend the status quo, and I’m fine with exploding rents and mass displacement.” It then rattled off examples including Chan’s opposition to Wiener’s state law to streamline housing projects.

Wiener campaign spokesperson Joe Arellano said Wednesday that he came up with the idea of making a chatbot ad shortly after the June primary election, when he saw a video showing a group of people putting up parody tech and AI advertisements in the New York City subway.

“I thought, this is an opportunity to do this right in the heart of innovation here in San Francisco,” Arellano said. “San Francisco right now is having this moment around AI and the billboards. … The overall craze around the industry has become a cultural moment.”

The chatbot cost $5,000 to make, a sum that includes the cost to secure the domain, host the site and obtain the pro version of Anthropic’s Claude AI model, plus staff time, according to Arellano. The campaign spent an additional $20,000 to rent two billboards in San Francisco promoting the bot.

The idea was to highlight Chan’s “record of obstructing progress” through a “chatbot that essentially says no to any kind of policy that you’re proposing,” Arellano said.

Chan’s campaign and her allies saw it differently.

“[It’s] never a good idea for a man to put words in a woman’s mouth — especially when they are falsities fraught with racist and sexist undertones,” Ian Krager, a spokesperson for Chan’s campaign, said in a text message. The chatbot, Krager said, showed Wiener was “bought and paid for by Big AI.”

Chan’s campaign shared several screenshots of interactions with the chatbot with The Times, including one in which the chatbot was asked if it was “from China.” (Chan was born in Hong Kong.)

According to the campaign’s screenshot, the chatbot replied that its “origins are classified under about seventeen different committee review processes.”

Then, it pivoted: “But I’d love to help obstruct something *else* you’re curious about! Here are some of my favorite topics,” and spat out a menu of topics to choose from, which included “blocking housing” and “derailing public transit.”

Wiener’s campaign said the chatbot was created with “strict guardrails” and designed to ignore controversial and malicious prompts and pivot back to Chan’s policy record.

Pelosi, who has endorsed Chan in the race, released a statement Thursday criticizing Wiener’s campaign for the chatbot, calling its use of AI to “fabricate a woman’s voice for ridicule or attack” a “gross misuse of technology.”

At first, Wiener defended himself, writing on X Thursday evening that his rival’s campaign inundated the chatbot with “malicious questions” about her accent, race and citizenship that the chatbot refused. The next day, Wiener reversed course.

“[Our] use of an AI chatbot clearly missed the mark,” Wiener said in a statement Friday. “The conversation became about the tactic instead of the issues that actually matter to San Franciscans.”

Wiener’s campaign on Friday took the chatbot offline and announced plans to take down the billboards.

Romero said experts began to have widespread discussions about how AI could be used to sway voters and affect democracy in the lead-up to the 2024 election when a company sent deceptive phone messages that used AI to mimic President Biden’s voice and discourage people from voting.

Since then, there have been several efforts by California lawmakers to rein in AI-generated advertising.

Gov. Gavin Newsom in September 2024 signed several AI-related bills. They include AB 2839, which banned the distribution of materially deceptive content that could harm a candidate’s reputation or electoral prospects, with exceptions for satire and parody, and AB 2355, which requires a committee that creates a political ad to disclose if it was generated or substantially altered by AI.

U.S. Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Fremont) have renewed an effort to update the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971 to clarify that existing bans on “fraudulent misrepresentation of campaign authority” and the “fraudulent solicitation of funds” also extend to AI-generated content.

“Fraudulent AI advertising has already proliferated in races across the country, and if Congress does not act, this runaway challenge will only get worse as AI becomes increasingly capable of blurring the lines between fact and fiction,” Schiff said in a statement.

Elena Kuhn, a spokesperson for Schiff, said the proposed legislation applies to material that attempts to “speak on behalf of other candidates,” meaning Hilton’s AI-generated cinematic clip of himself fighting a robot would be not be banned — contrary to the Republican candidate’s claims that it would be.

As performers protest and studios sue in their war on artificial intelligence, the entertainment industry is deepening its dependence on it.

Although few places are better than Hollywood at crafting a narrative and concealing what happens off-frame, a Los Angeles Times survey of job postings sheds light on what is happening offstage.

Among hundreds of job postings in late June, more than one in 10 was likely connected to AI. The top studios’ public postings suggest they have been recruiting people to build AI tools. They are also recruiting teams to defend their intellectual property against unauthorized AI use.

“There are plenty of studios that are hiring [for AI] but never talk about it in public,” said Yoland Yan, a co-founder of ComfyUI, a company that helps studios juggle different AI tools.

Companies have been hesitant to detail how they use generative AI in film production — partly because they are concerned about consumer and union backlash.

The Walt Disney Studios complex on May 3 in Burbank.

(Eric Thayer/Los Angeles Times)

Some in Hollywood described AI use as the new cosmetic surgery, where everyone knows it is happening, but few will admit to it.

Recent want ads show Amazon MGM Studios trying to find a principal AI executive and Walt Disney Studios advertising for a production innovation technologist job.

“What you’re seeing in those job postings is that adoption is already happening,” said Bryn Mooser, chief executive of Asteria, an AI film studio.

Netflix recently posted a job that didn’t exist a year ago.

The streamer was hiring for the role of “Manager, Generative Workflows,” a job to help integrate more AI into Netflix films. It promised hands-on experience with the cutting-edge technology.

“The industry is flooded with speculative GenAI roadmaps, but few are battle-tested in production,” the post said, referring to generative AI. The post said the role will work on introducing AI into Netflix’s slate of films being released in the U.S. and Canada.

Although some companies may be shy about sharing their AI plans, big stars who don’t have to answer to others have been more open about their embrace of the new technology for storytelling.

An exterior view of the Netflix sign at Netflix on Vine in Hollywood in 2025.

(Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times)

Rejecting AI is like picking a horse and buggy over a car, said “Star Wars” creator George Lucas.

“Artificial intelligence means it’s much easier for us to make movies,” he told a trade magazine earlier this year. “There’s nothing you can do about it. That’s progress. It’s the future.”

Some in Hollywood have a softer stance on artificial intelligence, with studios cutting deals with AI companies, and filmmakers like Martin Scorsese backing AI companies.

Ben Affleck launched an AI film tech company then sold it to Netflix for half a billion dollars.

When launching InterPositive, Affleck said he wanted to keep “storytelling human” by building AI tools that could fix lighting, generate missing shots and other things while “keeping creative decisions in the hands of artists.”

The Times’ survey turned up two senior InterPositive roles to update the programming to apply AI to visual effects .

The Culver Studios on Feb. 12 in Culver City.

(Kayla Bartkowski/Los Angeles Times)

To gauge what is happening behind the scenes, The Times used Claude Code to build a scraper to identify job postings at Disney, Universal, Paramount, Warner Bros., Sony, Netflix and Amazon MGM. It found around 250 film studio job postings that were still public as of late June. Around 30 of those seemed to be connected to AI.

Disney, Netflix and Amazon had job postings that were about using AI on the creative side of the business. Universal, Paramount, Warner Bros. and Sony had job ads suggesting they were also using AI but for marketing, distribution and audience analytics.

The postings suggest the Disney, Netflix and Amazon studios are building repeatable AI workflows for visual effects, animation, sound and dubbing. The companies also seem to be building in-house teams to develop custom generative-AI models, while also using third-party software.

None of the jobs advertised were to create AI that wrote scripts or created AI actors.

Disney’s ten or so AI jobs showed the century-old studio building out its AI research and production muscle, while protecting its vault of beloved characters.

Mouse House is hiring PhD-level talent to study “computer graphics and AI” for Pixar and Disney films, people to “bridge the gap between research and practical studio application.”

Industrial Light & Magic, the Disney-owned visual effects shop, was searching for supervisors to “explore emerging technologies (including AI/Machine Learning)” to develop new production workflows.

The company’s audio post-production unit, Skywalker Sound, seemed to be recruiting to build proprietary AI models for soundtracks, voice separation, and voice transfer, the process of taking a speaker’s tone and pitch, and applying it to new content.

Disney was also hiring to defend itself. Three of its jobs were for “content security” to assess AI tools and guard against piracy, watermarking and rights-protection work.

The company’s public posture has so far been pursuing lawsuits against AI companies for inappropriate use of copyrighted material, and it pulled out of its plans to invest $1 billion in an equity investment deal with OpenAI.

Netflix’s posts suggested it is bringing more AI to the creative side of its business.

Netflix’s senior director of creative innovation, Girish Balakrishnan, outlined at the Runway AI film festival how AI was used to create soccer fans in “Brazil ’70” and establish shots for fight scenes in “Glory.”

Amazon, an early adopter, was hiring a principal AI executive to drive AI-tool adoption across production, plus roles in operations automation and LLM content classification, the listings revealed.

The Seattle-based streamer has been the most aggressive AI adopter in studios, and commissioned three AI animation series through its GenAI creator fund in May. Amazon has also bankrolled a Manhattan Beach production services company, Innovative Dream.

Even as studios build bigger AI teams, many in the industry are resisting, and some film fans are concerned.

The actors’ guild SAG-AFTRA in June ratified a new four-year contract with special protections against synthetic performers, and the union has backed a national bill designed to protect individuals from unauthorized, AI-generated digital replicas.

Studios have met with the union twice a year since 2023 to provide a confidential report on their AI-related activities. The studios tell the union they aren’t yet using AI that would entirely replace humans, said a person familiar with the discussions.

The union says it has no evidence that generative AI is being used to create performances, and the studios are supposed to notify the union if that happens.

Actors, writers, production staff and movie fans are still resistant to the overuse of AI and defining when and where it is acceptable, so studios are treading lightly, said AI film studio CEO Mooser.

“It’s been really a challenging thing to adopt both socially, ethically and legally, but we are seeing more adoption of it than we’ve ever seen before,” he said.

Oscar-winning director Martin Scorsese is joining the ranks of entertainment industry power players embracing generative AI.

Black Forest Labs, the German AI startup behind the text-to-image model Flux, announced Tuesday that Scorsese is joining the company as an advisor.

The company unveiled the collaboration on its website with a video of the auteur using Flux to storyboard scenes, which involves mocking up shots before filming.

“This conveys a cinematic intelligence,” he said in the video, discussing the program’s uses with Black Forest Labs co-founder and Chief Executive Robin Rombach and Creative Artists Agency co-founder Michael Ovitz. According to the New York Times, Ovitz, an investor in Black Forest Labs, helped bring Scorsese aboard, along with Rick Yorn, Scorsese’s talent manager, whose investment firm BroadLight Capital is also an investor.

In a statement, Scorsese emphasized the potential for AI to transform the storyboarding process.

“For 70 years, I’ve been creating my own storyboards. There’s always been this problem of how do you communicate what you see in your head to your cast and crew. There are some things you have to see and feel,” he said. “I’m interested in the intersection of technology and storytelling, and seeing how that can push the bounds of creativity to create deeper and richer experiences for audiences.”

Traditionally, storyboarding is done by hand or digital illustration through a collaboration between directors and storyboard artists.

Scorsese’s public espousal of this technology marks the latest shift in attitude about AI from powerful Hollywood creatives. Since generative AI became widely accessible in 2022, Hollywood has struggled to navigate its power to rapidly upend industry norms.

Scorsese is not the first decorated filmmaker to embrace AI. James Cameron, the Oscar-winning “Avatar” director, is on the board of directors for Stability AI, where Rombach worked before launching Black Forest Labs. In his keynote address at the AI on the Lot conference last week, director and screenwriter Paul Schrader expressed a mixture of admiration and caution toward the technology.

“AI does not create — it combines,” Shrader said. “If AI wants an idea, it has to go to where that idea already exists. Of course, you can make the argument that that’s all artists do anyway, and to a degree that’s a valid argument. But you still have to come up with something.”

Not everybody is on board with generative AI’s potential transformations. Guillermo del Toro and Seth Rogen spoke out against the technology at Cannes last month, and below-the-line wokers, screenwriters and actors have continued to express apprehension and even horror at the prospect of being replaced by generative AI.

Scorsese’s entry into the AI field might especially shock fans given his traditionalist approach to filmmaking. In 2019, he famously criticized Marvel movies, calling them “theme parks” and “not cinema.”

“It isn’t the cinema of human beings trying to convey emotional, psychological experiences to another human being,” he said in a 2019 interview with Empire Magazine.

Even if his filmmaking centers humanity, Scorsese’s partnership with Black Forest Labs demonstrates his willingness to incorporate non-human assistance.

“Remember, cinema is a young medium, only around 125 years old, so we have to be open to how it can evolve,” he said in the statement on Black Forest Labs’ website.