“The NRCC is launching a digital ad campaign featuring artificial intelligence-created images of national parks ‘overrun with illegal immigrants.’ The GOP messaging takes aim at a number of vulnerable House Democrats who voted against a Republican resolution last week that would bar federal agencies from using funds to house migrants,” Punchbowl News reported in their Monday AM newsletter which, the way they describe it, makes it sound as though the ad photorealistically and deceptively depicted said “illegal immigrants” overrunning the parks as if it were happening now.

Which sounds troubling – until you watch the ad itself. “Using AI in this manner – even in political ads – is a controversial tactic,” Punchbowl writes like it were some ultra-sophisticated deepfake and not this montage of mediocre painting-styled images of trashed, overcrowded campgrounds that you wouldn’t even know contained illegal immigrants if the introductory text didn’t say it.

All of this is just fucking bizarre. Stupid too. It really raises the question of whether Punchbowl’s staff even watched the 40-odd second ad before they wrote that description. They didn’t say one way or the other about the nature of the imagery, but “controversial” carries a heavy implication that it was meant to deceive beyond the moronic and cheap scaremongering about national parks being “overrun with illegal immigrants.” We’ve been ragging on Punchbowl lately for carrying the House GOP’s water with the “impeachment momentum” bullshit (and don’t worry, they made room for that this morning too) to the point where it feels like they’re just writing Elise Stefanik’s press releases, though this is on a whole different level in terms of simping to the MAGA party’s whims.

It’s easy to imagine the House Republicans decided they would troll the libs who read Punchbowl with the bare minimum of what the term “AI-generated” could conceivably encompass and force-fed it to the access-hungry newsletter just to see if they would print it unquestioningly. That part worked brilliantly. They certainly put more effort into that than the video itself, but not much.

The NRCC staffers at least could’ve told Midjourney (the AI image generator) to put some sombreros on the “migrants” or have their tents covered in Mexican flags. Also what the hell is with the scale of the tents in “Sequoia National Park?” Are these “migrants” Keebler elves or something?