Mid-Terms Are Around the Corner, AI Deepfakes Should Make You Question What You Hear/See
3 min readWith the November 3 midterms four weeks out, a congressional race in western Wisconsin has turned into a live demonstration of what AI video can do to a campaign. Rep. Derrick Van Orden has spent two months posting AI deepfakes of his Democratic opponent, Rebecca Cooke, saying things she never said. Her lawyers have now sent him a cease-and-desist letter. His answer was another AI video.
A law that stops at the campaign account
Wisconsin passed a law in 2024 that requires a disclaimer on AI-generated content paid for with campaign funds. Van Orden’s clips, made with xAI’s Grok Imagine and posted to his personal X account, carry a small “Made with Grok Imagine” tag but no disclaimer inside the video, and campaign finance records show that account is not funded with campaign money. Marquette University’s Michael Zimmer told Spectrum News that “clearly, the spirit of the law is being violated here.” Law professor Bruce Boyden said Van Orden probably did not break the letter of it.
Cease and desist, answered by a duck
The videos include an August 4 clip in which a synthetic Cooke, standing beside Joe Biden, says she is running to “take advantage of as much corruption as possible and give every illegal alien free healthcare.” Others have her declaring “Let the peasants eat cake” and claiming she “just voted for two Communists.” Last week attorney Ben Stafford wrote that Cooke “never made the statements attributed to her,” called the videos “pure fiction,” and warned that the campaign would weigh every option under Wisconsin defamation law, Wisconsin Public Radio reported. Van Orden’s campaign called the letter a “tantrum.” The congressman then posted a new AI clip of a red duck in Democratic Socialists gear shouting “cease and desist.”
This is the whole country, not one district
Axios is tracking a growing list: Texas Senate nominee Ken Paxton’s ads blending real and fabricated statements from James Talarico, criminal complaints against Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick under that state’s deepfake law, and a cease-and-desist over AI-generated mailers in a North Carolina state Senate race. About 31 states regulate political deepfakes and at least 28 require disclosure, but Congress has passed no federal standard, and most state rules cover paid ads while skipping the social posts where these clips actually spread. Researchers find the clips stay persuasive even after viewers learn they are fake.
UW-Eau Claire political scientist Geoffrey Peterson told News 8000 where the burden now sits: “It becomes increasingly difficult to tell what’s real and what’s not, and it becomes, unfortunately, the burden of the voter to try and figure that out.”
What to do with your feed
Until the law catches up, treat any clip of a candidate that seems too perfectly damning as unverified. Check the candidate’s own channels, look for a generation tag, and assume the loudest video in your feed may have started life in a prompt box.