Pierre Poilievre's Conservatives' latest ad featured 'Canadians' who weren't even real. It takes us to a dark place

A new attack ad, posted by deputy leader Melissa Lantsman to Twitter, shows a grim warehouse and an interminable line of people with empty shopping carts. “Community food bank,” a banner reads. “Food pickup ensotary.” (Your first clue the video is AI-generated: It is bad at generating text.)

The video zooms in to the front of the line.

“We haven’t eaten today,” one lifelike AI avatar says to the other. “Yeah,” it responds, “we’re only technically hungry, though.”

The ad is ragging on the idea that Canada is only technically in recession.

The ad continues apace: There’s a creepy mostly-realistic child saying “don’t worry, daddy, you’re only technically unemployed.” Later, a computer-generated couple are informed by an exuberant bank manager that their home is being repossessed. (“Technically homeless,” is the punchline on that one.)

There’s truth to the message of the ad, even if its characters sit on the very edge of the uncanny valley. Food Banks Canada says their members have seen a doubling of demand since 2019, household debt is rising for all but the very well-off, mortgage delinquency is rising, GDP growth has been negative for two quarters. The Conservatives argue this is all real, and there’s no use caveating it — even though disposable income is actually rising across the board, unemployment is falling, and mortgage delinquency rates remain lower than a decade ago.

Whatever weight these real-world economic criticisms may have, however, are distorted by the sleazy way the Conservatives chose to make them.

Using the tools of an American AI company to generate realistic-looking depictions of hungry Canadians is grotesquely antihuman. It drags politics out of the real world and into the dystopic world of generative AI.

In the past, parties have certainly tested the boundaries of acceptable political advertising by hiring actors and deploying stock footage. But at least those ads feature real people — political ads claiming to be about real people should feature real people. (And that’s not a carte blanche either: parties have regularly gotten into trouble for using stock footage from foreign countries.)

Hiring actors to play poor people would be gross, too. But asking a computer to generate a lifelike scene of Canadians struggling to put food on the table is another level: It tilts us deeper into the muck of terminally-online unreal nonsense. It is politics by and for the denizens of Twitter, where real life is increasingly warped by technology.

Normalizing this generative advertising will bring us to some very unpleasant places. What’s to stop the Liberal party from generating an ad of Pierre Poilievre donning a Make America Great Again hat? The Conservatives could fire back an ad of Mark Carney’s face slowly morphing into Justin Trudeau’s. The Green Party could jump into the fray with a video showing the other leaders having their pockets stuffed with cash from shadowy oil executives. It will invite the question: Are any political ads real anymore?

Using AI to create an authentic-looking scene — one we must constant remind ourselves isn’t real — abrogates the need for our politicians to actually argue and convince people of their position. It pushes us into a world where politics becomes a test of who can create the most compelling visual fiction.

Conservatives argue that these videos lower the cost and time to produce these ads, allowing them to quickly iterate content on a broad variety of important topics for cheap. Well bully for them: But we regulate political advertising and financing specifically so parties can’t flood the zone with nonsense. And the Conservative party can spare us with the poor house routine — they raised $10 million last quarter alone, and Pierre Poilievre has an available soapbox he can access whenever he wants it.

Creating a pipeline of low-cost, high-volume advertising would thrust Canada into the kind of attack ad free-for-all which has corroded the United States’ democracy.

That seems to the plan. The Conservatives are taking their cues from Spencer Pratt, a Republican-aligned candidate for mayor of Los Angeles who has taken Twitter by storm. He’s spat out a deluge of AI generated slop ads, featuring the city on fire and the incumbent mayor made up to look like The Joker. (He, in turn, seems to be inspired by the deluge of AI-generated slop posted to President Donald Trump’s Truth Social page.)

Despite being heralded as an innovator, voters clearly hated it. Pratt came in distant third in this months’ primary.

Canadians, too, should spurn Poilievre’s attempts to sink our political discourse into a mean, stupid, disorienting game of holograms and unreality. Say no to the slop.