AI will be used way more in the upcoming Ohio 2026 elections, experts say

Artificial intelligence has become so advanced that politicians in Ohio have already begun using it in their campaigns for the upcoming elections, which could lead people to be deceived because they don’t know the content isn’t real, experts said.

Among the AI videos allegedly made by the Ohio Republican Party, for example, was one of Democratic gubernatorial candidate Amy Acton playing a game show with former Vice President Kamala Harris, according to The Columbus Dispatch.

Daniel Schiff, co-director of the Governance and Responsible AI Lab at Purdue University, told the news source that “it’s a dangerous game” that the politicians are playing.

“Things like playing around with the boundaries of misleading content, things like borderline falsely depicting your opponents or trying to emotionally appeal to or manipulate people while technically following regulations, I don’t think these are things that political campaigns should be lauded for,” Schiff told the Columbus newspaper.

Schiff, however, pointed out that politicians using AI is not a new thing, adding that people have been using the tool since 2016, The Dispatch reported. In 2024, Donald Trump Jr. posted an AI-generated image of his father sitting on a giant cat holding a gun, with the caption “Save our pets!!!!!,” a clear reference to his father’s allegations that Haitian immigrants, most of whom live in Springfield, are eating the local cats.

Even though people have been using AI for years, they have become even more reliant on it after Big Tech companies released tools like ChatGPT, which made the technology way more accessible to regular, non-tech-oriented people.

“Our party leadership gave us room to innovate, and we ran with it,” Nick Johnson, content and communications director for the Ohio Republican Party, told The Dispatch. “I’m proud to lead that effort every single day. We are confidently outpacing Ohio Democrats 6 to 1 on content production, and every ounce of that output is aimed at one thing: winning in November.”

According to the news source, a PAC supporting U.S. Sen. Jon Husted, R-Ohio, in his reelection race allegedly released an AI-generated ad criticizing Husted’s opponent, former U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio.

Schiff added that politicians also allegedly use AI to manipulate voices and impersonate them, which could persuade some voters, especially older ones, who wouldn’t know it isn’t the politician’s voice because it sounds so realistic.

“This content influences people,” he told The Dispatch. “It draws on their emotions. It can affect their views.”

However, it is not just Republicans who manipulate voters in this way. According to the news source, organizations like Grassroots Analytics help leftist political groups aggregate news and create press releases, mailers, and fundraising messages using AI.

Grassroots Analytics CEO Meghan McAnespie told the news outlet that AI saves people working on political campaigns a lot of time while allowing them to target specific groups to persuade them to vote. McAnespie added that AI gives underdog political candidates even a slight chance to win a race, since it allows them to create campaign materials they couldn’t before due to a lack of time or money.

McAnespie, however, said that she is concerned that leftists could lose this AI-fueled cultural race because they would oppose the technology, partially by opposing building data centers, which negatively affect the environment.

“It’s always dangerous when there’s an imbalance in tech and tools available or all of the resources being leveraged there,” she told the news source.

While most bills introduced by Ohio legislators are targeting the creation of AI child pornography, there is one bill, House Bill 185, introduced by state Reps. Adam Mathews, R-Lebanon, and Ty Matthews, R-Findlay, that, if it becomes law, would require political ads that use AI deepfakes to include a disclaimer saying that the content is not real.

“It’s tough to say there should be some teenager held legally liable because they made a video of a candidate doing something silly,” Ryan Kennedy, a political science professor and data analytics leader at Ohio State University, told The Dispatch. “That kind of stuff is just going to be more and more common.”