SARASOTA, Fla. — The Facebook ad campaign started in July, six weeks before the Republican primary for the Sarasota County Commission, a five-member board that sets the budget, appoints the county administrator and votes on zoning and land use. In one of the ads, an artificially rendered image depicts incumbent commissioner Joe Neunder, a Republican chiropractor, kissing Hillary Clinton over a candlelit dinner. In another, Neunder holds a giant stamp and perches suggestively on the shoulders of a suited man in a hard hat labeled “Big Development.” In others, he has Pinocchio’s nose, and he’s standing with his arms crossed as $100 bills and receipts swirl around him, alongside claims that he oversaw a government spending spree. 

A banner across the bottom reads: “Paid for by Local Government Accountability Inc.”

The ads carried the hallmarks of artificial intelligence: clunky airbrushed art and the errors from a cheap image generator. Researchers call it slopaganda, and it has been enthusiastically embraced by many Republicans and some Democrats this election season, according to campaign finance records and a growing list of candidates who blame the deceptive ads for their loss. 

But the Local Government Accountability Institute, or LGAI, goes a step further: Its creators seemingly used AI to create a fake organization posing as a nonpartisan think tank. On its websites, LGAI is described as a nonprofit organization that investigates the finances of local governments and publishes forensic reviews of city and county spending. 

But its operation, tactics and motives more clearly align with a political attack operation. While LGAI runs ads and publishes articles in opposition to specific candidates in the Sarasota race, the organization doesn’t disclose its employees, hasn’t registered with Florida election officials, lists a Washington, D.C., mailbox as its address, is incorporated through a secret registered agent and has its phone answered by a contracted call center whose receptionists have been told not to disclose any information about the organization. From its design to its content, LGAI’s website shows all the markings of being produced entirely by AI. It is littered with supposedly original “white papers” and “research” about Sarasota’s finances, offered as support for its attacks on local candidates like Neunder — writings that read like an AI fever dream. 

It’s unclear who is behind LGAI, but what they have built may be a bellwether for an election season already marred by dark money, deepfake attack ads, fraud pollsters, undisclosed paid endorsements, phony journalists and “pink slime” news outlets.

LGAI is a shell for a dark money operation — an affordable and legal option for anyone seeking to influence elections under cover of anonymity. But the website also reveals a new way AI might supercharge an already deceptive political ecosystem, said Daniel Schiff, an associate professor at Purdue University and co-director of the Governance and Responsible AI Lab. This type of AI-built organizations could lend credibility to fly-by-night political operations, he said, which could allow anyone to game search results and AI answers using similar sites. (To understand how AI bots can be easily tricked by bogus content that looks authoritative, consider the case of the journalist and the hot dog eating contest.) 

Schiff describes it as “the intersection of dark politics and dead internet theory.” The risk is that a flood of cheap organizations like LGAI could dilute the information space and weaken the credibility of legitimate organizations, he said.

And while LGAI’s offerings may be obvious slop to the average voter, Schiff said, the fakes will get more sophisticated, as they have with other AI offerings.

“Organizations and the tools themselves will get better at creating more compelling and less artificial versions of this content,” he said.

* * *

The AI attack ads against Neunder and another Republican commissioner, Mark Smith, ran on Facebook for about a month, through LGAI’s account and another, US Polling Research. In total, the entities behind these pages spent about $20,000 to get the ads in front of Sarasotans more than half a million times, according to Meta’s ad library.

Neunder lost his primary to Jim DeNiro, a retired Sarasota Police Department sergeant, by 798 votes, or about 6 percentage points. He won’t blame LGAI for his loss, but he’s still smarting from what he sees as dirty tricks — what he calls a “beta test” for future election shenanigans.

“It was a coordinated effort to deceive the voters,” Neunder told me. “All I wanted was a fair shake.”

Neunder doesn’t know who was behind LGAI, or US Polling Research, a Facebook page that posted more than 50 of the Sarasota ads. He suspects local developers and political operatives may be to blame, but he can’t say for sure. 

Michael Barfield, an investigative reporter at the Florida Trident, a nonprofit news website, doesn’t know either. Barfield first reported on the group in early August, and after digging into the backend of LGAI’s website, found files labeled “war room.” Some of the files spelled out the design of its AI-generated materials, including the prompts and buzzy phrases a human fed to the AI to create LGAI’s content, which included “big red numbers,” “one-line gut punches” and an “anger hook.” The AI flagged some of its own graphics and reports as misleading or unsupported, warnings that were ignored, Barfield reported.

A week of reporting got me no closer to figuring out who was behind LGAI. Several emails went unanswered and repeated calls to the organization’s phone number went to a call center that one worker told me was contracted by LGAI. When I asked to speak to the director, the various women who picked up the phone referred me to a voicemail, because the director — referred to as “he” — was busy, in a meeting, at lunch and, finally, unwilling to speak with me. The operator asked that I not call again and refused to put me through to voicemail. 

When asked who else I could speak with, the operator told me there was no one else. “Just Martin Ma-TAY,” she said. When I asked how to spell his name, she apologized and said she wasn’t supposed to say. It’s not clear who she may have been referring to. It could be a fake name, and public records searches on variations of the last name didn’t turn up anyone named Martin with likely ties to LGAI.

The other Facebook page running ads, US Polling Research, has been around since 2019. It describes itself as “a non-partisan, non-biased, opinion research website” that “seeks to understand American opinions — real opinions, like yours.” 

Aside from the recent Sarasota ads, its Facebook page is sparse and appears to be an old engagement farm — where digital marketers posted bait on connected Facebook pages to harvest contacts and sell the lists. A 2020 US Polling Research post of a Nancy Pelosi photo captioned “DESCRIBE ME IN ONE WORD” drew thousands of angry comments and promised to “continue the conversation through Messenger.” A 2019 survey posted to the page Guns Love asked whether the government should be able to confiscate assault rifles, and thanked voters with a special offer on a Betsy Ross flag, free coin included.

US Polling Research has hosted several websites, including uspolling.com, uspollingresearch.com and uspollinginstitute.com. It ran on WordPress, which included a user account named lukamin, and one graphic still carried the name “lukavetticubrilo.” Luka Cubrilo is the co-founder of Vetti Media, a digital advertising firm. 

Cubrilo did not return requests for comment. Vetti Media’s other co-founder, Scott Jordan, responded to my email and said neither Cubrilo nor Vetti Media was involved with the Sarasota ads, “aside from starting a Facebook page many years ago.” Jordan said he had been hired to post the ads, through a different business he owns, and that a confidentiality clause prevented him from saying more.

In a broader conversation over email about LGAI and the ads, Jordan argued that AI has “democratized political advertising.”

“Candidates have been using graphic design to present their opponents in a negative light and running digital ads since the tools first became available,” Jordan said. “Now you don’t have to hire an expensive media agency with a top level graphic design / video team or have a lot of technical skill to create and distribute visually powerful, effective election content.”

The post How a fake, dark money think tank could permanently alter U.S. elections appeared first on MS NOW.

From MS Now.