You can sell almost anything these days by slapping an AI label on it, but not politics.

From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech.

I'm Megan McCarty Carino. 2024 is the first major US election in the generative AI era with tools

that can create images, video, or audio of real people doing or saying things video or

saying things they never did.

or just generate stock photos of people with weird looking

appendages and boilerplate targeted slogans. But the potential to deceive has led

about two dozen states to enact some form of regulation requiring political ads

that use AI to include a label.

So how do voters respond when they know a campaign has used AI?

That's what Scott Brennan and his team at NYU's Center on Technology Policy set out to answer in a

recent study.

We ran an online experiment.

We showed participants two ads for pretend candidates and pretend county

commission races in real in real states and real districts and the

ads that we showed them they they contained either the label that was that is now in truth required by Michigan

or the label that's required by Florida or no label at all.

And then some of those ads seem to come from a Republican, some from a Democrat, and then some from, you know, there was no clear sort of a party affiliation. And then once they had seen these ads,

we asked them to rate the appeal and trustworthiness

of the candidates, the accuracy of the ad,

give their intention to share it or like it or flag it if they had seen it on social media, and then several other questions about their opinions on policy in this area.

And what were your major takeaways? How did these

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