Texans have seen it all this year: Senator John Cornyn twirling Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett on the dance floor; Attorney General Ken Paxton driving his mistresses down to the “Love Shack”; and Texas state Representative James Talarico in a dress singing a tune about transgender people—all made possible by the powers of generative artificial intelligence.

Political ads have long been notorious for stretching the truth with underhanded editing techniques, false claims, and computer generated imagery, but the ability to instantly generate an uncanny mimicry of candidates has taken this year’s attacks to new heights of absurdity and debasement. 

In that way, AI is transforming the political landscape and contorting conventional ideas about truth, free speech, and fair elections. Experts say the law is failing to keep pace as candidates and consulting firms use the rapidly evolving technology to caricature the opposition in new and controversial ways. Nowhere is this more true than in Texas, where a historic $500 million (and counting) in advertisements has flooded TV, radio, and digital platforms for the U.S. Senate race alone.

“We’re seeing questionable ads that are using various AI technologies all around the country, but the ads in Texas take it to a different level,” said Amy Kristin Sanders, a professor of media law at Penn State University. “This kind of synthetic content creation really messes with people’s traditional sense of what they can trust.”

(Youtube screenshot; Cornyn campaign)

AI tools are being used for everything from simple campaign flyers and infographics to fully synthetic videos and deepfakes of candidates. A recent study commissioned by the American Association of Political Consultants (AAPC) found that a majority of consultants are using AI to streamline the research process and perform mundane tasks. Republican consultant and admaker Vinny Minchillo said some agencies are taking it further and deploying AI in the creative process.

“It’s in very small ways that you don’t notice. I have used it as a transition between two shots, or to create an image that’s moving that used to be a still image,” Minchillo said. “But I think when you’re using AI to create something out of whole cloth, you just have to be smart.”

Some of the biggest Republican consulting agencies in the country, like Fifty Plus One (FP1) Strategies are doubling down on the use of AI. Synthetic ads are fast and inexpensive to produce, and they’ve even won the Reed Awards and the Pollie Awards—also known as the Oscars of political advertising.

In one ad during the primary season, the Cornyn camp portrayed Congressman Wesley Hunt with a deepfake where he parades around a puny pomeranian. The amusing video and tagline, “That dog don’t hunt,” were intended to emasculate the congressman. FP1 Strategies said the video was produced in one day by creative director Trent Wisecup, and it won four Reed awards.

“The best AI is deployed in the ruthless pursuit of excellence, and that requires old-fashioned elbow grease,” Wisecup said, describing his creative process on LinkedIn. “Think AI fluffs your ego? My agent teaches me about humility every day.”

(Youtube screenshot; Cornyn campaign)

As silly or preposterous as some of these ads may seem, it’s fully synthetic videos that give legal scholars like Sanders a sense of trepidation. That’s because the law tends to lag behind technological advances. Social media has become the Wild West of expressive content, and deepfakes blur the lines between free speech versus disinformation and defamation. Paxton’s “King James” attack ad is a perfect example. The uncanny deepfake version of Talarico is backdropped by a pride poster as he scribbles all over the Bible in crayon. It works in references to old quotes the Democrat actually said but presents them in a completely made-up context.

“We’re walking a really fine line between types of speech that we’ve historically protected, like parody and satire, and these new forms of synthetic content that have a much higher probability of fooling someone,” Sanders said.

Another survey commissioned by the AAPC found that most voters are deeply uncomfortable with the use of AI in political campaigns, whether it’s to craft a text message or a full blown deepfake. About half of survey respondents said it is unacceptable to use AI to write fundraising emails or texts, while 73 percent said it’s unacceptable to artificially generate an image or video for a campaign ad. Creating a deepfake of an opponent saying something they never said was considered the most egregious use of the technology, with 95 percent disapproval.

“Clients have asked us not to use AI because they feel like it is taking the edge off our message,” said Minchillo, who has worked with various consulting firms and campaigns around the country. “The usage of AI becomes the message rather than the story we’re trying to tell.”

Congress has yet to pass any federal regulations of deepfake campaign ads, so states are handling the dilemma at the local level. In 2019, Texas passed a law that criminalizes the publication of deepfake videos within 30 days of an election with the intent to injure a political candidate or to influence an election. Last year, the Legislature also considered a measure to require disclosures on AI political ads, like in some other states, but the bill never passed the Texas Senate. The House bill, which was carried by the deposed former House Speaker Dade Phelan, drew heavy backlash from the right-wing activist corps in Texas who saw the legislation as an attempt by the political establishment to police political speech. 

A recent controversy in the Texas lieutenant governor race is raising questions about the narrow application of current state law.

In September, Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick posted two deepfakes on social media of his opponent, Democratic state Representative Vikki Goodwin. In one scene, she wears a Longhorns jersey that reads “Taxes” instead of “Texas.” In another scene, the artificial Goodwin says she supported a capital gains tax, death tax, and state income tax. The ads also included deepfakes of Talarico and Democratic gubernatorial candidate Gina Hinojosa.

Goodwin responded by filing a police report in mid-September, citing the state law against deepfakes in political ads. “This is a video that looks like me. Words are coming out of my mouth, so I just felt it was important to put a stop to it,” Goodwin told the Observer. In a sworn affidavit accompanying the police report, Goodwin said she believed the deepfake was made with intent to “fraudulently influence the outcome of an election.”

Patrick quickly deleted the ads after Goodwin filed the report, which she says has made it difficult to pursue the case any further. A spokesman for Patrick told the New York Times that the deepfakes were an “obvious parody” that were published well before 30 days from Election Day.

Sanders said the 30-day window seems like a somewhat arbitrary boundary that doesn’t account for the real harm deepfakes can cause. “There are large groups of people that do engage in early voting,” Sanders said. “Many voters may make up their mind long before that.”

Ultimately, Goodwin said she would prefer if deepfake attack ads weren’t allowed in political campaigns at all because they’re a harmful distraction from the issues that really matter. That ties in neatly with her opposition to data centers and her plan to end tax subsidies for the corporations who build them. She hopes her case against Patrick can set some sort of precedent against future misuses of AI technology.

A sweeping ban on synthetic content in campaigns might appeal to many Americans, but Sanders said it’s probably impossible to achieve.

“Anytime the government regulates based on the content of the speech, the government has to show that there is a compelling government interest,” Sanders said. “And then of course, they have to show that the law is narrowly tailored to achieve that objective.”

In this case, the government has a compelling interest to preserve the sanctity of free and fair elections, but an outright ban would not be considered narrowly tailored. Sanders said that might discriminate against synthetic AI content without accounting for all the other kinds of political ads that use deceptive techniques, like clipping your opponent out of context. A federal judge in Montana recently blocked officials from enforcing the state law against deepfake campaign ads because it raised First Amendment concerns.

Sanders said candidates could still seek redress through existing civil laws. A candidate could sue for defamation, arguing that the deepfake constituted false speech, which injured their reputation. Under the First Amendment, however, political speech is considered sacred for the functioning of our democracy. There is a high bar for public officials to prove defamation because the courts must preserve the right to scrutinize those in power. Add satire into the mix, and these deepfakes become even more challenging to litigate.

“In some contexts, the law protects speech that isn’t necessarily accurate,” Sanders said. “Some of the most important critiques of our political and social issues of the day are done through the vehicle of parody and satire.”

Sanders said mandated disclosures of AI-generated content in campaign ads might be the only salient regulation that doesn’t significantly intrude on First Amendment principles. AI is here to stay, and voters will need to exercise greater scrutiny of the information they’re getting about candidates, especially as synthetic content becomes normalized in the years to come.

“You’re not going to put that genie back in the bottle,” Minchillo said.

The post Inside the New AI Slop Era of Texas Politics appeared first on The Texas Observer.

On September 24, a federal judge ruled that the University of Texas at Austin had acted within its rights when it canceled a pro-Palestinian protest in April 2024 and later suspended one of its student organizers. Twelve days later, on October 6, Fady Joudah’s Exhibit G: Poems, Essays, and Photographs of Gaza was named a finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry. 

If the three years since the events of October 7, 2023, have been one long court proceeding, argued on college campuses and in the press, whom is Joudah’s new “exhibit” meant to persuade?

“Since the genocide,” he writes in one poem, accounts of Palestine in English have been tasked with absolving “the culture industry of its complicity.”

That phrase “culture industry” comes from Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer. In 1959, Adorno cautioned that Germany could not work through its Nazi past while the causes of Nazism persisted, and he was wary of anyone impatient to feel clean. Joudah, a Palestinian American and an internal medicine physician at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, writes of a catastrophe that has not ended. As one poem puts it, “After the genocide, the genocide.”

Yet accounting, too, can help a nation feel clean. In “Late Hussein, Late Ali,” Joudah imagines Israel’s archive of drone strikes: “The civilized keep records to purge their wickedness from the national soul, recollected in tranquility.” Borrowing Wordsworth’s definition of how poetry originates, Joudah turns the phrase against a nation recollecting its violence with a clear conscience.

Exhibit G (Publisher)

Joudah keeps his own records for a living. In Exhibit G, the medical chart assumes poetic form. He examines Gaza as he was trained to examine a patient. In the essay “A Glass of Water, a Burning Boy,” he describes footage from October 2024 of Shaban al-Dalou burning to death in a hospital courtyard. The fire moves “cephalad,” toward the head, and al-Dalou is “beyond nociception,” past feeling pain. 

Asking the reader’s permission for “the vulgarity,” Joudah likens the young man’s raised arms to a pose from Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” video. He then asks: “Is there a death we have not cheapened?” Clinical language keeps the brutality at a professional distance, but the pop-culture reference collapses it. 

The essay moves to Houston, to the hospital Joudah works “in, at, or for,” which “spends millions of dollars to drag a single American life out of imminent death.” One spring, a retired physician kept his dying wife on life support for three weeks, until the couple could reconcile “with futility on their own terms.” The wife, an arts patron concerned “only about beauty,” not mortality, called Joudah Dr. Death. “She couldn’t have known,” he writes, “I was in the middle of my genocide.”

In Gaza, there was no such time for reconciliation. Bystanders threw a blanket over the burning al-Dalou, which the fire devoured on contact. What links the two deaths, Joudah writes, is “a healthcare system borne of a system that spends gazillions to annihilate other lives in wars.”

He records an American doctor’s verdict on Gaza’s vanished doctors: Only “animals for physicians” would abandon their patients as they did. Joudah’s reply is addressed to the reader: “Your good, kind doctor said it. Your next appointment.”

Most of the book’s photographs come from the Gaza Soup Kitchen, which Joudah’s friend Hani Almadhoun started “in lieu of grief” after Israel killed five members of his family. They show children lining up with pots and water jugs—almost none of the carnage American readers have learned to expect.

Joudah interrogates how such pictures get made, and for whom. In “Exhibit G: Surviving Image,” adults remind the children to smile, and the photographers, “thirsty and hungry as the kids,” also “shoot for the donors in the USA.” A reader who knows how the smiles are produced can find no easy comfort in them. Joudah asks: “What image of childhood is enough for a people to stay alive?”

Another poem transposes Adorno’s dictum—“To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric”—for the news cycle: “In a species where the news commits genocide, / one should not report news after Gaza.” Two photographs follow: boys and young men pushing dented pots through a gap in a concrete wall and two photographers pointing long lenses toward them.

Portions of Joudah’s record are redacted. The brackets that titled his previous collection in 2024, […], return in “Late Hussein, Late Ali”: “On March […], on the […] of Ramadan, during year one of our genocide, on the day you abstained, and the resolution passed, a legislative absolution in which I and my family tree were non-binding— / and with the aid of your AI eye in the sky, Israel killed Hussein.”

The brackets withhold the date, but the sentence points to one. Hussein was killed after the United States allowed a United Nations Security Council ceasefire resolution to pass by abstaining from the vote, then dismissed it as non-binding. Hussein was 22, a recent graduate, who was just months from his commencement when the “extermination began.” His younger brother, Ali, was killed months later. “No colleges, only dust,” Joudah writes. 

“The premier demand upon all education,” Adorno said in 1966, “is that Auschwitz not happen again.” Joudah has less faith in schools. Gaza has gone without them for “a year, now two, then three and counting,” he writes in “Surviving Image,” and, in an empire, education is “the incubator of illuminators and eliminators.”

He sees one defiant exception in the student encampments of 2024. “Where else in the US today,” he asks, in “Baby Moses & Khalas,” “is a shared living space capable of organized resistance?” The state, he notes, “comes down hard on universities to disintegrate the last, albeit flimsy, effective physical presence of community in America.” 

Texas has proved him right. In the UT case, Judge Robert Pitman relied on Tinker v. Des Moines, the 1969 Supreme Court ruling best known for protecting students who wore black armbands to protest the Vietnam War. It also permits schools to restrict speech when they reasonably anticipate substantial disruption. Pitman found that UT had—even though its own police anticipated a peaceful protest. 

Rice University, where I study, is private, and its policy defines a demonstration as “one or more persons” and lets officials revoke approval “at any time and for any reason.” Both universities govern protest by what might happen. Exhibit G, true to its title, is evidence of what already has.

“All hope is local,” Joudah writes in “Symphony in G Major.” For him, local often means his garden in Houston. In the book’s final lines, he discovers a monarch butterfly dead there: “Whatever failed her, migration / or procreation, wasn’t wicked to her. / I stroked her powdered wings / and left her for the ants.”

Hers is one of the few deaths in Exhibit G that no person caused, but Joudah treats it no differently than the rest. He looks closely, and he writes.

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In a deeply personal 60-second ad aired in September ahead of the state’s midterm elections, Texas Democratic gubernatorial candidate Gina Hinojosa shares her tragic pregnancy loss story. More than two decades ago she and her husband were “overjoyed” expecting their first child until an “unimaginable diagnosis” of trisomy 18, a severe genetic condition, assured a fatal outcome. 

“The doctor said I need you to understand she is not going to live,” said Hinojosa, her voice cracking through tears. “I did understand, but I was making that choice. I chose her.”

Hinojosa proceeds to say her daughter, who did not survive birth, is “why” she fights for Texas families’ “right to send their kids to good neighborhood schools. For an economy where their kids can afford to stay, where the powerful don’t get to tell the rest of us how to live.” Glaringly absent from the heartfelt political ad is any mention of reproductive rights, abortion, or Texas abortion laws. In fact, with anti-abortion undertones, the video could reasonably be interpreted as projecting a “pro-life” message to viewers unaware of Hinojosa’s robust pro-abortion legislative record during her almost 10 years serving in the Texas House. Reproductive rights advocates—while proudly and publicly endorsing Hinojosa as a gubernatorial candidate—told the Texas Observer that the campaign spot has even disappointed some in their community.

The “choice” Hinojosa so painfully explains she could have made many years ago—that is, between giving birth and undergoing abortion—is today, virtually non-existent as an option. The ad, likely meant to appeal to moderate and Republican voters, is a strategic one in what is considered a competitive race, at least based on recent polling. 

“We have been encouraging candidates like Gina to speak about abortion access unapologetically and with clarity. When we don’t explicitly use the word abortion, we produce greater stigma and shame,” said raven Freeborn, chief executive officer at reproductive rights advocacy group Avow Texas. “This is a crisis that ends in death. It is necessary for our candidates to be brave, bold, and direct about abortion rights.”

Gubernatorial candidate Gina Hinojosa speaks at the 2026 Texas Democratic Convention in Corpus Christi. (Photo by Eden Shamy )

In a state that barred nearly all abortion care months prior to the fall of Roe v. Wade and enforces one of the strictest criminal bans in the nation, with no exception for rape, incest, or lethal fetal anomalies, and which has led to a devastating string of deaths amid a maternal mortality crisis) abortion rights would seem to naturally dominate the November midterm election cycle; instead, leading statewide Democratic candidates such as Hinojosa and Senate candidate James Talarico appear to be placing the issue on the back burner. 

Freeborn says there is a “noticeable difference” between the way local and down-ballot candidates, like some running for the Texas House, are vocally embracing reproductive rights versus what candidates at the top of the ticket are saying, and that appears intentional. 

While Hinojosa signaled she would help “do away” with the steep criminal penalties doctors face for performing abortion, including up to life in prison, during a recent Politico interview, she also admitted that widening abortion access “will not be my priority as governor because that takes way more than the election of a governor.” However, if elected governor, Hinojosa could certainly use her power to veto Republican-backed bills that come across her desk, set legislative priorities, and issue executive orders, as Governor Greg Abbottt did during the COVID-19 pandemic to temporarily block abortion care. 

When asked to comment on concerns that the campaign is avoiding the issue of abortion rights, especially considering her opponent’s aggressive track record of championing anti-abortion policies, Hinojosa issued a statement that omitted the word. “[Abbott] has put countless women’s lives and fertility at risk because he decided we should be forced to carry sick babies that will not live. When I’m governor, I will make sure that Texas women have the right to make their own choices, and be able to do so with privacy and dignity.”

Hinojosa certainly isn’t alone. When asked about the issue during a recent CNN town hall, the Presbyterian seminarian and Austin state Representative James Talarico, vying for a U.S. Senate seat against Attorney General Ken Paxton, told an orthodox Catholic “pro-life” voter they could find “common ground” on abortion. He vocalized support for reducing abortions by decreasing the number of unplanned pregnancies through expanding access to sexual education and contraception. And drawing from his religious education, Talarico has continually asserted the Bible is “silent” on abortion. When asked by the Observer for a response to those who say he is not highlighting abortion enough, his campaign issued a laundry list of Paxton’s “disastrous” attacks on reproductive rights; yet Talarico doesn’t appear to be prioritizing exposing his opponent’s vast anti-abortion record on the campaign trail. 

For Democratic state Senator Nathan Johnson, who is hoping to replace Paxton as the next Texas attorney general over Republican Mayes Middleton, abortion rights are omitted as a priority on his campaign website, a stark departure from previous Dem AG candidate Rochelle Garza, who made the issue a key focus of her run in 2022—when Roe was overturned—and vowed to stop enforcement of the law. 

Paxton has wielded the power of the attorney general’s office to zealously defend the state’s extreme abortion laws, threatening hospitals, doctors, and abortion funds with legal action, and fighting in court against nearly two dozen women who suffered under the ban. As attorney general he opposed federal emergency protections for pregnant Texans; criminally charged and sought to imprison a Houston midwife for alleged abortion care; and is currently facing a lawsuit from the family of Tierra Walker, a Texas woman who died as a result of the state’s ban. 

“Paxton is such a clear target for Talarico, there is so much available to criticize when it comes to abortion rights,” said Freeborn. “But candidates are not seizing these moments, it feels like such a wasted opportunity.”

One factor at play is the perceived lessons gleaned from unsuccessful campaigns of the the recent past. Elevated by her 13-hour filibuster meant to defeat a package of abortion bills, former state Senator Wendy Davis ultimately lost her 2014 bid for governor, after being smeared “Abortion Barbie,” by the right wing. In reality, Davis sought to distance herself—or at least moderate her stance—from the very issue that propelled her, saying she would support a 20-week abortion ban (albeit if deference is given to the woman and her doctor), drawing ire from abortion rights advocates. Beto O’Rourke, easily bested by Abbott in his 2022 gubernatorial campaign, promised to rescind the state’s abortion ban and widen reproductive health care if he ascended to governor. And presidential candidate Kamala Harris chose Houston to host a heavily attended pro-abortion campaign rally in 2024 before her defeat by Trump. 

“One of the things that you’re seeing in this election cycle is largely an avoidance of an issue that has been front and center in many previous elections,” said Joshua Blank, Texas Politics Project research director at the University of Texas at Austin. “Democrats feel that campaigning around abortion would be a losing issue for them right now.”

However, recent polls show Texans are widely supportive of abortion rights, with even a decline among Republicans advocating for stricter abortion policies since the state’s laws went into effect. Nearly 40 percent of Texans strongly disapprove of how lawmakers have handled abortion policy and 43 percent believe abortion laws should be less strict, according to polls conducted this summer by the Texas Politics Project. And a 2025 study from the University of Houston’s Hobby School of Public Affairs found that almost half of Texans want the Texas Legislature to pass laws that make it easier to access abortion. An overwhelming majority, more than 80 percent, believe exceptions for rape and incest should be allowed as well as abortion in the event of a lethal fetal diagnosis. 

Demonstrators march and gather near the Capitol following the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade in June 2022. (AP Photo/Eric Gay, File)

Shellie Hayes-McMahon, executive director of Planned Parenthood Texas Votes, the group’s electoral arm, said that while Democrats are clearly “shying away” from abortion this election cycle, reproductive rights are still at the top of mind for Texans facing some of the most punitive laws in the nation. 

“I don’t think abortion access is being talked about enough this election cycle. It is not a priority issue on the campaign trail right now because Democrats are extra cautious,” said Hayes-McMahon.“But abortion is still a very important issue for voters, for families in Texas. These bans are literally killing women in Texas. How can it not be?”

Blank points out that the affordability crisis has dominated the midterm campaign cycle and for good reason, as rising fuel, housing, and food prices make the everyday cost of living untenable for some Texans. When the economy is strained, it tends to “crowd out” what are classified by political strategists as “social” issues like abortion care, he said. (Hinojosa exemplified this during a recent Texas Tribune interview by saying, “I live in reality. My agenda is an economic agenda. I have no interest in being in the space of culture wars.”)

“Democrats are trying to stay laser focused on the economy because they feel it provides them with the best chance of winning, even if that means they’re going to ignore some issues that are really important to their voters,” Blank said. 

Yet relegating abortion to merely a “culture war” issue is myopic, reproductive rights advocates argue. Abortion is inextricably tied to affordability, especially in Texas where the trek out of state for legal care—which may include gas, flights, hotel stays, and lost wages—can total thousands of dollars. Those Texans who are unable to obtain access and forced into parenthood must contend with escalating child care costs—and state-led cuts to assistance —amid inflation. Studies show denying women that access is linked to household poverty. In a recent lawsuit against anti-abortion activists, Texas mother Maria Puerto quantified the price of not having the economic resources to travel across state lines for care: Forced into two pregnancies while struggling as a single parent earning minimum wage, Puerto has requested $459,782– the average cost of raising two children in the state of Texas. 

And Texas abortion bans may be hurting the economy overall. A study from the Institute for Women’s Policy Research estimates that the laws cost the state nearly $15 billion annually in financial losses for women and businesses. 

“The ability to plan the size of your family is directly related to your financial security,” said Yvonne Gutierrez, executive director with Reproductive Freedom For All. “Reproductive rights are not just a social issue like some politicians want you to believe, they are absolutely intertwined with economic freedom. You cannot untangle them.” 

Still, not all Democratic candidates seem worried about speaking explicitly about abortion. Joining advocates during a recent rally outside the Department of State Health Services to demand the release of delayed maternal mortality data, state representative and candidate for lieutenant governor Vikki Goodwin stood as the sole statewide political candidate to attend the event. “Women are leaving this state because they don’t feel safe being pregnant in Texas. That is unacceptable,” she said, sharing that her daughter only felt comfortable giving birth outside Texas. Goodwin’s campaign website lists an action plan for reproductive health care, including a targeted call to repeal Texas abortion laws. 

“I think there’s hesitancy from some of the statewide candidates to make abortion a central issue, that it may harm their campaign,” Goodwin told the Observer in an interview. “But I think it’s just the way you talk about it. I don’t think anyone wants to see women dying during pregnancy. … It’s something that’s incredibly important to me, and it will be a high priority when I’m lieutenant governor.”

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