A campaign ad posted by Democratic U.S. Senate Candidate Scott Colom appears to show his opponent, Republican U.S. Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, running down the steps of the U.S. Capitol, covering her face with a leather folder while papers fly out of her hands. She runs from journalists clad with cameras, microphones and bright lights as they ask her questions like why she has not held a town hall. Hyde-Smith slides into a black car as the campaign ad ends.
But the woman in the video is not actually Cindy Hyde-Smith. It is an AI-generated portrayal. And though Colom’s ad states the video is “based on a true story,” at no point does the ad disclose that it was generated using AI.
This is not the first time in which the Democrat has used fictional methods to depict Hyde-Smith. Last year, he posted a fake phone call with Mississippi’s junior senator on social media when kicking off his campaign.
On Sept. 3, 2025, Colom held his phone as he sat at a wooden table, telling viewers in a social media video that he was about to call Hyde-Smith to “wish her a good night.” Nothing in the video or its caption disclosed that the phone call was fake.
But Colom’s team confirmed that it was, saying the Democrat was joining in on a social media trend in which people call and wish their friends a good night, his communications team told the Mississippi Free Press. The team shared a Barstool Sports TikTok video as an example.
Hyde-Smith’s team has also generated fictional content depicting Colom. The campaign team created a fake website, colomforsenate.com, using Colom’s name and a mugshot of the Democrat to instigate claims that he is a “transgender defender” who advocates for “sex change surgeries for minors and inmates.” His real campaign website can be found here.
Usage of AI-generated campaign ads and political content have soared during this election cycle, said Scott Brennen, director of NYU’s Center on Technology Policy and a policy research affiliate at NYU’s Center for Social Media, AI and Politics. He and his colleague, Anna Viñals Musquera, recently released a report about the usage of AI in political content during the 2026 election cycle.
“There is a lot of general concern about AI, and I think it’s still an open question of how that intersects with AI in political content,” the director told the Mississippi Free Press in an Oct. 14 interview. “We don’t really know. In the report we put out last week, we hypothesized that it could sort of increase the chance that some of these, especially like really negative ads, personal attack ads, are kind of like backfire, which is something that some negative ads in kind of rare cases do, where people are so turned off by a very mean-spirited ad that they actually think less (of the candidate who made the ad) after seeing it.”
‘Something Voters Deserve to Know’
The fake colomforsenate.com website opens with a pop-up of a mugshot of a man presumed to be a young Scott Colom. When the Mississippi Free Press asked whether the mugshot of Colom was fake, Sen. Hyde-Smith’s campaign team deflected back to the Democrat, saying in an Oct. 13 email to ask him “about his past criminal record and previous arrest. Sounds like something voters deserve to know.”
After Colom’s team initially denied the mugshot’s authenticity, the Mississippi Free Press confirmed it was taken after Colom was arrested for a misdemeanor offense in 2001 when he was 18. “When I was a high school senior, one of my friends and I did something dumb and stayed out past curfew,” Colom said in a statement on Oct. 16.
Hyde-Smith said to look beyond the fake website and focus on Colom’s background.
“Scott Colom supports sex-change procedures for children and protections for doctors who perform those procedures,” the senator claimed in an Oct. 8 email to the Mississippi Free Press. “That’s radically out of step with Mississippi. I believe there are two sexes. I believe women and girls deserve their own sports and private spaces, and I oppose irreversible sex-change procedures for children. This isn’t about a website, it’s about a very clear difference between the two candidates, and voters deserve to know where both of us stand.
The Democrat told the Mississippi Free Press in an Oct. 5 interview that he believes in “fairness” in girls’ sports and medical science that says children should not undergo gender-affirming surgeries. He noted that out of all of the town halls he has done during his campaign for U.S. Senate, not one person has brought up this issue to him.
Colom fired back with a website called whereiscindyhydesmith.com. Her official website can be found here.
“If you have information on Senator Hyde-Smith’s whereabouts—or when she plans to hold a public town hall—Mississippi voters would like to know,” the front page of the Where Is Cindy Hyde-Smith website says.
But Colom recently announced that he wants to enact an immediate, temporary pause on new AI data centers in Mississippi until the state regulates them and proceeds with the deals in a transparent manner. He told the Mississippi Free Press on Oct. 8 that his usage of AI in campaign ads does not conflict with his policy goal for data centers.
“The reality is, I’m pointing out her hypocrisy,” Colom said of Hyde-Smith. “She’s on the committee that has jurisdiction over AI and data centers. She could make it illegal to do that. She could regulate AI. She refuses to do it because they got her bought and paid for. They’re running ads on her behalf. So, the reality is, if you try to ask a question, she might call security on you. I’m portraying a true story. She calls security on voters.”
In September, a reporter attempted to approach Hyde-Smith to ask her what she thought about the grand jury’s decision not to indict anyone for the death of Nolan Wells. The senator attempted to tell the reporter that she was not willing to do an interview, and she walked over to a security guard to dismiss the reporter.
“Sir, I don’t do the home interviews,” Hyde-Smith said repeatedly.
The security guard told the reporter to stop harassing the senator, noting that Hyde-Smith said she did not want to do an interview. Another security guard approached the reporter as the Republican senator boarded a train and left the area.
Colom shared the video on his social media platforms on Sept. 23, saying “It’s hard to watch this video. A reporter asked Cindy Hyde-Smith a serious question about Nolan Wells’ tragic passing, and she chose to run away and call security. At the very least, she could have acknowledged Nolan’s family and offered her condolences for their tremendous loss.”
The Three Types of AI-Generated Political Content
Three types of AI-generated content are being used in political campaign ads, Scott Brennen explained. Deceptive deepfakes are AI-generated content like videos, photos and audio recordings used to deceive the viewer into believing the content is real. An example of a deceptive deepfake is the mugshot of Scott Colom that Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith’s team used on the fake campaign website for the Democrat, Brennen said.
“We did some work back in 2024 more directly looking at the potential harms of the sort of deceptive deepfakes,” he said. “I mean, we concluded that certainly this is really concerning, but it’s probably not going to really reshape elections. The place where it might be more problematic is in smaller, especially down-ballot races where there’s just less content about candidates.”
Political “slopaganda” is another way campaigns are using AI to create ads, the director noted, adding that it is not always clear whether something is political “slopaganda” or a deceptive deepfake. Colom’s AI-generated ad of Hyde-Smith running from reporters could be classified as the former because most viewers could clearly identify the video as fiction, Brennen said.
Philosopher Michal Klincewicz of Tilburg University coined the term “slopaganda” in his 2025 collaborative research paper, “Slopaganda: The interaction between propaganda and generative AI” with Mark Alfano and Amir Fard.
“By propaganda we mean communication intended to manipulate beliefs, emotions and attention for political ends,” Klincewicz explains. “Add generative AI, and the result is ‘slopaganda.’”
The team at NYU that works with Brennen has been working to uncover the potential harms of political “slopaganda” under the consideration that people using AI in that manner are not attempting to deceive people with the content.
“The potential harms here are probably more in line of, you know, worsening something,” he said, “like affective polarization, which is the animosity, the enmity that we feel towards the opposing political party or further decreasing trust in institutions, especially epistemic institutions like media or science when there’s sort of this unclear landscape of truth.”
Using AI to make informative ads in a cheaper, easier way without attempting to deceive viewers or depict something that did not actually happen is the third most common usage of AI in political campaigns.
“I do think it is important to contextualize this more broadly, what we know about political ads, which is that they don’t do that much,” Brennen said. “They don’t have that much effect on anything, but certainly not on candidate selection. There’s a good deal of research that basically (says) … political ads rarely have a strong influence on what candidates voters select. They’re more effective at mobilization, like getting people out to vote, getting them to events, at fundraising and acquisition.”
Mississippi’s AI Law
Mississippi is one of 31 states that has laws requiring disclaimers on political ads that use AI-generated content. Mississippi’s law prohibits a person from using someone’s likeness to create an AI-generated ad unless the ad has a disclaimer.
Scott Colom’s latest campaign ad does not include a disclaimer telling viewers that the ad may use artificial intelligence. And though Hyde-Smith’s fake Colom website with an alleged mugshot of the candidate is not confirmed to use AI, it also lacks any disclaimers. The Democrat’s AI-generated video of the Republican has a caption that says, “Based on a true story,” but does not explicitly say the ad is AI.
“Basically all of the laws that we have are focused on the deceptive deep fake side and not really on the political ‘slopaganda’ side and it’s just much harder to know how to deal with it,” Scott Brennen said. “We have a much better sense of how to deal with deceptive AI content. The front-line defense is labels. It’s like, well, if it’s deceptive, you slap a label on it, thinking that will solve the problem.”
He noted that, in general, labels on the AI ads are not very effective.
But Mississippi’s 2024 law has some loopholes that political candidates can skirt around because it does not include “content that constitutes satire or parody,” which could apply to Colom’s AI-generated video of Hyde-Smith running from reporters.
The law says that a person who knowingly disseminates an AI-generated depiction of a political candidate is “guilty of a crime and may be sentenced to prison time, if the person knows or has actual knowledge that the item being disseminated is a digitization and the dissemination (either) takes place within ninety days of an election; is disseminated without the consent of the depicted individual; (or) is disseminated with the intent to injure the candidate, influence the results of an election or deter any person from voting.”
Brennen said it would be up to the courts to decide whether Colom’s and Hyde-Smith’s AI ads violate Mississippi’s law.
During the 2026 legislative session, another AI-related regulatory bill was making its way through the Mississippi State Capitol, though it ultimately died in the House Judiciary A Committee. The Mississippians’ Right to Name, Likeness and Voice Act would have created a legal route for Mississippians to sue if their name, voice or image was digitally altered or used without their permission.
Robocalls
Before artificial intelligence became today’s popular phenomenon, robocalls—both real and fake—have been a favored method of reaching voters.
In the 2019 Mississippi governor’s race, Democratic nominee Jim Hood sent out robocalls targeting Black voters featuring a recording of former President Barack Obama the night before the election. Hood ultimately lost the governor’s race to current Republican Gov. Tate Reeves.
Republicans began circulating the robocall recording of Obama urging Democrats to vote for Hood, even as others claimed on social media that it was fake. Barack Obama’s communications director at the time Katie Hill confirmed to the Jackson Free Press that the voice on the robocall was indeed the former president’s.
In January 2024, thousands of New Hampshire voters received a fake, AI-generated robocall from former President Joe Biden the night of the state’s primary election that dissuaded Democrats from voting. Steve Kramer, who admitted to creating the fake call, is facing a $6 million fine from the Federal Communications Commission and state criminal charges. Kramer used Lingo Telecom, a Michigan-based telecommunications company, to transmit the robocalls, and the company agreed to pay a $1 million FCC fine.
“The funny thing about the Biden robocall is that it got a huge amount of publicity, but people identified it as fake very quickly, and the creator of that was charged, I believe criminally,” Brennen said. “So, there was definitely fallout from that one. I don’t know, more generally, if robocalls have fallen off. I mean, it wouldn’t at all surprise me if they had, but (that has) nothing to do with AI. (It’s a) communication change. It’s harder to get a hold of people on their cell phones.”
Incumbent Republican U.S. Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, Democratic candidate Scott Colom and independent candidate Ty Pinkins will be on Mississippians’ ballots for U.S. Senate in the Nov. 3 election.
Editor’s Note: This story has been updated after the Mississippi Free Press verified the authenticity of the Scott Colom mugshot used by the Cindy Hyde-Smith campaign. A response from the Colom campaign has also been included.
Mississippians will vote for candidates running for federal, regional and local offices in the general election on Tuesday, Nov. 3. Mississippians must have registered to vote by Oct. 5 to cast their ballot in the upcoming election. Check your voter registration by visiting sos.ms.gov or by calling your county circuit clerk’s office.
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