Wesleyan: $80M on 164 AI-generated midterm ads, 80% GOP

Political candidates and their backers have spent more than $80 million to make upward of 164 AI-based ads this election season, Al Jazeera reports, citing the Wesleyan Media Project. Republican candidates and their backers are behind 80 percent of those ads.

Wesleyan also found that 69 percent of the AI ads it identified carried no disclaimer about AI use. Those ads accounted for 78 percent of the spending in its database.

"People are seeing things that didn't happen, seeing politicians say things they actually didn't say," said Travis Ridout, a political scientist at Washington State University and a co-director of the Wesleyan Media Project.

Scott Babwah Brennen of NYU's Center on Technology Policy calls the genre "slopaganda" and says it is built to "communicate deeper truths rather than factual truths," which he warns "could impact voter trust."

Thirty-one states have passed laws requiring AI-generated ads to be labeled. No federal rule exists ahead of the November 3, 2026 midterms. "State laws do what they can without encroaching on the First Amendment," said Ilana Beller of Public Citizen. "There is still a need for a federal law."

The federal gap is one of the more durable threads in our regulation tracker's 290 stories from the past 90 days; for context on the detection side, academic benchmarks are moving the other direction.