On a stifling April afternoon in Ajmer, in the Indian state of Rajasthan, local politician Shakti Singh Rathore sat down in front of a greenscreen to shoot a short video. It was his first time being cloned. Wearing a crisp white shirt and a ceremonial saffron scarf bearing a lotus flower--the logo of the BJP, the country's ruling party--Rathore pressed his palms together and greeted his audience in Hindi. Before he could continue, the director of the shoot walked into the frame. Divyendra Singh Jadoun, a 31-year-old with a bald head and a thick black beard, told Rathore he was moving around too much on camera.

As voters queued up early morning on November 30 last year to vote in legislative elections to choose the next government of the southern Indian state of Telangana, a seven-second clip started going viral on social media. Posted on X by the Congress party, which is in opposition nationally, and was in the state at the time, it showed KT Rama Rao, a leader of the Bharat Rashtra Samiti that was ruling the state, calling on people to vote in favour of the Congress. The Congress shared it widely on a range of WhatsApp groups "operated unofficially" by the party, according to a senior leader who requested anonymity. It eventually ended up on the official X account of the party, viewed more than 500,000 times. "Of course, it was AI-generated though it looks completely real," the Congress party leader told Al Jazeera.