This paper introduces the largest and most comprehensive dataset of US presidential campaign television advertisements, available in digital format. The dataset also includes machine-searchable transcripts and high-quality summaries designed to facilitate a variety of academic research. To date, there has been great interest in collecting and analyzing US presidential campaign advertisements, but the need for manual procurement and annotation led many to rely on smaller subsets. We design a large-scale parallelized, AI-based analysis pipeline that automates the laborious process of preparing, transcribing, and summarizing videos. We then apply this methodology to the 9,707 presidential ads from the Julian P. Kanter Political Commercial Archive. We conduct extensive human evaluations to show that these transcripts and summaries match the quality of manually generated alternatives. We illustrate the value of this data by including an application that tracks the genesis and evolution of current focal issue areas over seven decades of presidential elections. Our analysis pipeline and codebase also show how to use LLM-based tools to obtain high-quality summaries for other video datasets.

For years now, AI has undermined the public's ability to trust what it sees, hears, and reads. The Republican National Committee released a provocative ad offering an "AI-generated look into the country's possible future if Joe Biden is re-elected," showing apocalyptic, machine-made images of ruined cityscapes and chaos at the border. Fake robocalls purporting to be from Biden urged New Hampshire residents not to vote in the 2024 primary election. This summer, the Department of Justice cracked down on a Russian bot farm that was using AI to impersonate Americans on social media, and OpenAI disrupted an Iranian group using ChatGPT to generate fake social-media comments. It's not altogether clear what damage AI itself may cause, though the reasons for concern are obvious--the technology makes it easier for bad actors to construct highly persuasive and misleading content.

Illinois advertising professor Michelle Nelson says voters should expect to see a lot more generative AI in political ads during the 2024 election cycle, warning that it might be difficult to impossible to tell what's real and what's fake. It's estimated that 12 billion will be spent on political ads this [USA] election cycle – 30% more than in 2020. The sheer volume of ads is remarkable, and there is vast potential to use this political information to contribute to democracy: to reach more potential voters and provide accurate information. There's also more potential than ever for generative artificial intelligence to misrepresent candidates and policies, leading to confusion in the voting booth. News Bureau editor Lois Yoksoulian spoke with advertising professor and department head Michelle Nelson about the topic.

Americans in Silicon Valley fear advanced artificial intelligence in campaign ads will influence and manipulate voters' decisions in the 2024 election. Americans in Silicon Valley are predicting advanced artificial intelligence could significantly influence and manipulate voters in the 2024 elections, with a potential for "disturbingly false" political advertising to push agendas. "I've seen some hilarious videos and some concerning ones where it's getting too realistic," Travis, of San Jose, said. As advanced artificial intelligence applications proliferate across industries, the rapidly evolving technology has raised concerns about its ability to manipulate elections, with some 2024 presidential campaigns already utilizing the tool. Former President Trump's presidential campaign, for example, triggered an uproar on X after using artificial intelligence to recreate Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis' 2024 presidential announcement with fictional guests, including billionaire Democratic donor George Soros, World Economic Forum Chair Klaus Schwab, former Vice President Dick Cheney, Adolf Hitler, the devil and the FBI.

Fox News Flash top headlines are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com. Michigan is joining an effort to curb deceptive uses of artificial intelligence and manipulated media through state-level policies as Congress and the Federal Elections Commission continue to debate more sweeping regulations ahead of the 2024 elections. Campaigns on the state and federal level will be required to clearly say which political advertisements airing in Michigan were created using artificial intelligence under legislation expected to be signed in the coming days by Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat. It also would prohibit use of AI-generated deepfakes within 90 days of an election without a separate disclosure identifying the media as manipulated.

Earlier this week, the Republican National Committee released a video that it claims was "built entirely with AI imagery." The content of the ad isn't especially novel--a dystopian vision of America under a second term with President Joe Biden--but the deliberate emphasis on the technology used to create it stands out: It's a "Daisy" moment for the 2020s. We should expect more of this kind of thing. The applications of AI to political advertising have not escaped campaigners, who are already "pressure testing" possible uses for the technology. In the 2024 presidential-election campaign, you can bank on the appearance of AI-generated personalized fundraising emails, text messages from chatbots urging you to vote, and maybe even some deepfaked campaign avatars.

Facebook has worked for years to revamp its handling of political ads -- but researchers who conducted a comprehensive audit of millions of ads say the social media company's efforts have had uneven results. The problems, they say, include overcounting political ads in the U.S. -- and undercounting them in other countries. And despite Facebook's ban on political ads around the time of last year's U.S. elections, the platform allowed more than 70,000 political ads to run anyway, according to the research team that is based at the NYU Cybersecurity for Democracy and at the Belgian university KU Leuven. Their research study was released early Thursday. They also plan to present their findings at a security conference next August.

A growing number of empirical studies suggest that negative advertising is effective in campaigning, while the mechanisms are rarely mentioned. With the scandal of Cambridge Analytica and Russian intervention behind the Brexit and the 2016 presidential election, people have become aware of the political ads on social media and have pressured congress to restrict political advertising on social media. Following the related legislation, social media companies began disclosing their political ads archive for transparency during the summer of 2018 when the midterm election campaign was just beginning. This research collects the data of the related political ads in the context of the U.S. midterm elections since August to study the overall pattern of political ads on social media and uses sets of machine learning methods to conduct sentiment analysis on these ads to classify the negative ads. A novel approach is applied that uses AI image recognition to study the image data. Through data visualization, this research shows that negative advertising is still the minority, Republican advertisers and third party organizations are more likely to engage in negative advertising than their counterparts. Based on ordinal regressions, this study finds that anger evoked information-seeking is one of the main mechanisms causing negative ads to be more engaging and effective rather than the negative bias theory. Overall, this study provides a unique understanding of political advertising on social media by applying innovative data science methods. Further studies can extend the findings, methods, and datasets in this study, and several suggestions are given for future research.

MPs today warned Mark Zuckerberg they are ready to issue a formal summons to force him to give evidence on the Facebook data scandal. The Culture Committee has written to the billionaire insisting the 40million UK users of his site deserve'answers'. There was fury last week after it emerged Mr Zuckerberg has agreed to give evidence to the European Parliament - despite still snubbing the House of Commons inquiry. He has already appeared before the US senate, but sent a deputy to be grilled by the MPs. The Culture Committee has written to the billionaire insisting the 40million UK users of his site deserve'answers' Culture, Media and Sport Committee chairman Damian Collins stunned his colleagues by revealing the development while they grilled another executive sent in Mr Zuckerberg's place In a letter to Facebook UK's head of public policy Rebecca Stimson, committee chairman Damian Collins wrote: 'Following reports that he will be giving evidence to the European Parliament in May, we would like Mr Zuckerberg to come to London during his European trip. We would like the session here to take place by 24 May.

The architect of the world wide web Sir Tim Berners-Lee today talked about some of his concerns for the internet over the coming years, including a nightmarish scenario where artificial intelligence (AI) could become the new'masters of the universe' by creating and running their own companies. Masters of the universe is a reference to Tom Wolfe's 1987 novel The Bonfire of the Vanities, regarding the men (and they were men) who started racking up multi-million dollar salaries and a great deal of influence from their finance roles on Wall Street and in London during the computerised trading boom pre-Black Monday. Speaking at the Innovate Finance Global Summit today, Berners-Lee envisioned a world where AI systems start to develop decision-making capabilities and the impact this will have on the fairness of our economic systems. He laid out the scenario where AI could decide which companies to acquire and took this to its logical conclusion: "So when AI starts to make decisions such as who gets a mortgage, that's a big one. Or which companies to acquire and when AI starts creating its own companies, creating holding companies, generating new versions of itself to run these companies. "So you have survival of the fittest going on between these AI companies until you reach the point where you wonder if it becomes possible to understand how to ensure they are being fair, and how do you describe to a computer what that means anyway?" Although it's hard to imagine shedding too many tears over the loss of the decision makers responsible for the 2007 crash, the scenario does threaten to wipe out an entire industry and raises some serious questions about how fair a financial system without any human involvement can be. This is similar to the fear laid out recently by AI-sceptic Elon Musk to Vanity Fair: "Let's say you create a self-improving AI to pick strawberries and it gets better and better at picking strawberries and picks more and more and it is self-improving, so all it really wants to do is pick strawberries.