The AI attack-ad nightmare is coming true

AI is producing reality-bending midterm ads about defaced Bibles, upscale dinners and a board game with a "Death to America" playing card.

Why it matters: The warnings about deepfakes are coming true.

Election laws haven't kept pace with a world where campaigns can put words in opponents' mouths and create realistic-looking scenes that didn't happen.

The Wesleyan Media Project found $137 million had been spent on 220 AI-generated ads through Oct.

11, mostly from Republicans.

Four states have laws prohibiting certain uses of AI-generated deepfakes in political ads, while 27 more require some form of disclosure about their use.

No federal law specifically regulates AI-generated political ads.

The big picture: An Axios analysis found numerous political ads partly or fully made by generative AI, sometimes undisclosed.

Georgia Senate: Senate Leadership Fund, a super PAC aligned with Senate Republicans, has run a series of AI-generated deepfake ads depicting Democratic Sen.

Jon Ossoff getting beauty treatments.

The ads mock Ossoff's reported campaign spending on hair and makeup , saying he "talks pretty" but has "an ugly record" and "a lot to cover up." Ossoff said in a C-SPAN interview : "It is deeply troubling to see ... deepfake videos used to fabricate political advertising.

And it's a s lippery slope toward the destruction of truth in political debate, and the ad should come down immediately." The ads don't disclose AI use, which Georgia law doesn't require.

Michigan Senate: A super PAC called Front Line Action used AI in an ad depicting Democratic candidate Abdul El-Sayed in a fabricated family photo with podcaster Hasan Piker and four women wearing niqabs.

Another AI-generated scene has El-Sayed playing a Risk-style board game with his half-sister , Eman Abdelhadi, and Piker.