The Defeat of Spencer Pratt Is a Defeat of AI Slop

Last week, Republican TV personality and Los Angeles mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt appeared to be one of the two candidates poised to advance to the November general election. Time spotlighted how “he and his supporters employed provocative, and often effective, AI ads to spread his message.” But yesterday, major media outlets declared Pratt the loser, with two Democrats advancing to the general election: the incumbent Karen Bass and City Councilmember Nithya Raman.  

Maybe natural intelligence still holds an advantage over the artificial.  

Most pro-Pratt AI videos were produced outside of his campaign, but some of these were shared on Pratt’s X account. They racked up millions of views by satirizing the incumbent Mayor Karen Bass and other prominent California politicians, depicting the city as a hellscape overrun by homeless people and drug addicts, and insinuating that’s the way the Democratic politicians and progressive activists like it. 

“LA Is Worth Saving,” generated by AI filmmaker Charles Curran, envisions Los Angeles as a mash-up of Marie Antoinette and The Dark Knight, with Bass looking like Heath Ledger’s portrayal of The Joker, presiding over a Louis XVI-style court that includes a foppish Gavin Newsom and an alcoholic Kamala Harris, guarded by armed “DSA” officers while the famous Hollywood sign burns. Spencer Pratt, dressed like Batman, arrives to lead a pack of fed-up residents armed with tomatoes. Marco Rubio, behind a DJ table, cheers Pratt on as Bass and her allies run terrified from the palace.  

It’s a ridiculous ad. Yet it captivated many Republicans. Jeb Bush shared it on X with the comment: “Maybe the best political ad of the year.”  

Curran followed it up with a video of a mother telling her daughter the bedtime story of the monster Bassura, who “let the drug addicts take over the parks so no kids had a place to play. And she let them hurt the puppies.” 

Another Hollywood figure, Damilare Sonoiki, formerly a TV writer for The Simpsons and black-ish, produced his own series of AI videos titled “You Are Not Alone,” one of which portrays women after a Pilates class guiltily confessing to each other that they are voting for Pratt.  

Close to election day, Sonoiki published an ad showing fictional people announcing their support for Bass. For example, a disheveled person says, “I’m voting for Karen Bass because I want to keep injecting in public parks,” and a buttoned-up person in a shiny boardroom declares, “I’m voting for Karen Bass because the more homeless people there are, the more money my nonprofit can raise to fight homelessness.” He also dropped on Election Day “An LA Carol,” in which the Ghost of LA Past shows Scrooge a pristine city from 10 years ago, and the other ghosts show him a city in ruins. (Eight years ago, Sonoiki attracted notoriety for pleading guilty to an insider trading scheme while working for Goldman Sachs, and for having his Harvard University diploma withheld after allegations of sexual assault, which he denied.) 

One AI video that appears to have been produced by the Pratt campaign was designed to look like an attack ad from Bass against Pratt. The video itself, shared on Pratt’s X account, does not include a disclaimer that it was made with AI, although a reply to the post from Pratt included a disclaimer.  

The benefits of AI-produced videos, as noted by Time, are that they are “much cheaper than traditional advertisements” and “there is a belief that some social media sites may be artificially boosting AI content.” But the Pratt experience suggests that’s not enough to warrant its use. AI video may look amazingly realistic, but it still looks fake. And if you have to use fakery to make a city look bad, maybe the city isn’t as bad as it looks.  

Pratt’s electoral performance, strong in the city’s wealthy Westside, geographically tracked that of the billionaire Republican mayoral candidate Rick Caruso from 2022. But Caruso cleared his June primary with 36 percent of the vote; Pratt is currently at 26 percent and may fade some more as the final ballots are tallied. AI videos did not give Pratt a boost, just the opposite.  

Moreover, the two surviving candidates eschewed using AI. Bass’ main TV ad was a traditional spot, with the incumbent speaking to the camera and outlining her accomplishments, including “the first two-year drop in homelessness ever,” undercutting Pratt’s attempt to paint the city as overrun by homelessness. Raman, who has positioned herself to Bass’ left but has struggled to unify the left, released an ad before Election Day touching on the same themes Pratt has stressed—concerns about homelessness and mismanagement of the Palisades fire—but without the snarky bombast.  

Well, there was a bit of snark, tacitly aimed at Pratt, in the final frame: “No AI was used in the making of this video.” 

One mayoral campaign is not enough of a data set to draw sweeping conclusions about the efficacy of AI-fueled political ads. But, according to Pew Research Center, the vast majority of Americans are “concerned” about the rise of AI. It stands to reason that a political ad that uses AI is going to make average voters suspicious, especially since those voters seem to be able to detect when AI is being used for manipulative purposes.  

Since AI ads are cheap and easy to make, they will likely continue to tantalize candidates. But Pratt’s pratfall is a cautionary tale that teaches an old lesson: You get what you pay for.  

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