When the erstwhile reality TV star Spencer Pratt reposted a video on X recently, it went viral so quickly that it seemed few people stopped to really ask themselves what, exactly, they were looking at. Jeb Bush called it “maybe the best political ad of the year.” The former Republican congressman Matt Gaetz called it “basically a maximalist expression of what a political ad can do.”
It’s understandable that they thought it was a campaign ad. Spencer Pratt, a registered Republican, is running for mayor of Los Angeles, and the video echoed the themes of his dark-horse campaign: Los Angeles has gone to seed thanks to its inept and venal leadership, and he’s the man to fix it. But by any normal definition, it wasn’t an ad at all. It was something altogether stranger: an A.I.-generated fan video by a Los Angeles-based filmmaker named Charlie Curran, whose other recent works include a video of the pope dancing to the drill rapper Chief Keef and one of the Rizzler flying a sortie over Iran.
The video Pratt posted depicted Los Angeles as Batman’s Gotham. Karen Bass, the Democratic incumbent mayor and one of Pratt’s opponents in the upcoming nonpartisan primary, is the villainous Joker. As things unfold, a man who looks a lot like Joe Rogan, if Joe Rogan dressed like Commissioner Gordon, fires up a searchlight that hits the overcast sky with an insignia that reads “SP.” At this signal, Pratt dons black armor, cape and gloves — a lot like Batman’s — and descends to rescue a postapocalyptic Los Angeles from its Democratic captors.
To make such a video in the past would have required actors who look like the politicians in question, sets, soundstages, costumes, Joe Rogan, extras, makeup artists, cameras and people to operate them, permits, writers, editors, security and, you would have to imagine, permission to use the intellectual property in question. This would have cost a bunch of money, which would also mean creating a political action committee and issuing all related disclaimers about who made this video and why. But now there’s generative A.I. — and, for better or worse, people can sort of do whatever they want.
