When former reality TV star Spencer Pratt recently reposted a video on X, it went viral so quickly that it seemed few people stopped to really ask themselves what exactly they were looking at. Jeb Bush called it “perhaps the best political ad of the year.” Former Republican congressman Matt Gaetz called it “basically a maximalist expression of what a political ad can do.”
Understandably, they thought it was a campaign ad. Spencer Pratt, a registered Republican, is running for mayor of Los Angeles, and the video echoed the themes of his dark-horse campaign: Los Angeles has gone to seed thanks to its inept and venal leadership, and he’s the man to fix it. But by any normal definition, it wasn’t an ad at all. It was something altogether stranger: an AI-generated fan video by a Los Angeles-based filmmaker named Charlie Curran, whose other recent works include a video of the Pope dancing to drill rapper Chief Keef and one of the Rizzlers flying a tour over Iran.
The video Pratt posted depicted Los Angeles as Batman’s Gotham. Karen Bass, the Democratic incumbent mayor and one of Pratt’s opponents in the upcoming partisan primary, is the villainous Joker. As things unfold, a man who looks a lot like Joe Rogan, if Joe Rogan is dressed as Commissioner Gordon, turns on a searchlight that hits the cloudy sky with an insignia that says “SP.” At this signal, Pratt dons black armor, cape and gloves – much like Batman’s – and descends to rescue a post-apocalyptic Los Angeles from its democratic captors.
To make such a video in the past would have required actors who look like the politicians in question, sets, sound effects, costumes, Joe Rogan, extras, make-up artists, cameras and people to operate them, permissions, writers, editors, security and, you’d imagine, permission to use the intellectual property in question. This would have cost a lot of money, which would have also meant creating a political action committee and issuing all related disclaimers about who made this video and why. But now there is generative AI – and for better or worse, people can do whatever they want.
