Digital Slop and Political Theater

Political campaigns once required a budget, actors, and at least a semblance of craft. Generative artificial intelligence has eliminated those tedious barriers to entry, giving political operators the power to churn out low-grade outrage at virtually zero marginal cost.

One Nation’s recent campaign launch in Victoria demonstrated the logical endpoint of this technological shift. The party unveiled an AI-generated video featuring a parade of heavy-handed caricatures—ranging from armed men to a scene cribbed directly from a Benjamin Netanyahu campaign ad depicting a young man declaring his conservatism to a horrified family. The video was engineered to provoke predictable outrage, allowing its creators to feast on the resulting media noise and play the martyr.

Yet Pauline Hanson’s outfit is hardly alone in embracing digital slop. Conservative group Advance deployed AI imagery depicting former Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews celebrating a Labor victory, while Liberal MP Jason Wood circulated a fabricated image of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese at an empty airport. Online platforms are increasingly littered with fake interview clips debunked by fact-checkers. When creating political content requires nothing more than a text prompt, low-effort caricature naturally drives out genuine political argument.

What makes this spectacle notable is the absolute helplessness of Australia's regulatory apparatus. The Australian Communications and Media Authority finds its hands tied because its mandate fails to cover online video streams. Meanwhile, the Australian Electoral Commission possesses powers restricted purely to procedural misinformation—such as lying about polling place locations—leaving it unable to address offensive or misleading political narratives.

This oversight gap has spurred calls for legislative action. Senator David Pocock gathered 35,000 signatures on a petition demanding a ban on election deepfakes before the next federal vote. During parliamentary inquiry hearings, experts including Professor Terry Flew warned that unchecked synthetic media degrades public trust in key institutions. The warning echoes an October 2024 parliamentary report detailing how synthetic media threatens to erode democratic norms.

The federal Labor government has so far resisted demands to enact an outright election ban on AI tools. Whether statutory bans can successfully police cheap political theater remains doubtful, but the current vacuum ensures that Australian voters will continue to be targeted by automated provocations.

Written by Sandy van Dongen sandy.vandongen@alpineweekly.com