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The First AI Slop Election Is Over. The Slop Isn’t Going Anywhere.

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The First AI Slop Election Is Over. The Slop Isn’t Going Anywhere.

No matter your politics, election seasons can be disorienting. The tsunami of aggressive ads and spammy texts is enough to make any smartphone owner chuck the thing into a river and crawl into a cave on some remote hillside for a few weeks. But this year’s midterms have been particularly mind-liquifying, thanks to an unrelenting bombardment of AI slop ads.

AI-generated propaganda isn’t new. You may remember the “What if?” ad the Republican National Committee released ahead of the 2024 election, depicting a dystopian future in which migrants overwhelm the U.S. border and crime forces San Francisco to shut down. Even after securing his second presidential term, Trump has frequently posted AI-generated images to social media depicting himself as a strong and ruthless leader.

But the campaign season that (mercifully) just ended featured AI ads on an unprecedented scale. According to an October report from the Wesleyan Media Project, a research group tracking political marketing efforts, total campaign spending on AI-generated ads during this election cycle surpassed $187 million, compared to under $50,000 that went towards AI ads during the 2024 election season. The most recent figure, the report noted, was “almost surely lower than the actual level of spending given that many ads do not contain disclaimers and some instances of AI use are difficult to determine with the human eye alone.”

The WMP identified a total of 289 AI-generated ads aired during this year’s midterms, the vast majority of which (82%, equalling a total of about $169 in spending) were funded by Republican candidates or their allies, while 13% were aired by Democratic campaigns (the remaining 5% came from other parties).


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