Zohran Mamdani won the race to be New York City’s mayor by a landslide this week, leaving his Democrat-turned-independent rival Andrew Cuomo in the dust.
Mamdani ran a strikingly effective campaign that showed him as a genial and relatable young man with a penchant for connecting authentically with voters, often by talking to them right on the street. He kept a laser focus on popular issues of affordability, and projected an infectious sense of optimism.
But Mamdani’s fortunes were unquestionably boosted by Cuomo’s campaign being an unmitigated disaster. No matter how hard Cuomo’s aides tried, they couldn’t cover up the sense that the former New York governor, who resigned from the position in 2021 after the Department of Justice accused him of sexually harassing over a dozen women, was a fundamentally repulsive figure. Now 67 years old, his comeback efforts radiated elitism and entitlement owing to the political dynasty he was born into, oozing an aura of decay that put his election efforts on a permanent back foot.
Few facets of Cuomo’s campaign underscored this more than its conspicuous embrace of using AI — tech that CEOs have promised will solve climate change and cure cancer. but in reality is mostly associated by young people with the slop posted by their boomer elders on social media. There was no chance that the actual Cuomo could outcharm Mamdani, so out came the AI Cuomo.
One particularly lampooned campaign ad was a garishly AI-generated video of himself doing all kinds of quintessential “New York” jobs, like operating a subway car or cleaning the windows of a skyscraper. The ad projected the opposite of authenticity: here was a man who wasn’t even bothering to pretend to put his real self out there, and who treated working class jobs like Halloween costumes. It didn’t help that during his campaign, Cuomo barely made public appearances or mingled with anyone outside his circle of cronies.
Evincing his campaign’s shrewdness, Mamdani used the opportunity for an easy layup by tying back to Cuomo’s housing plan — which had already been outed as being partially created using ChatGPT.
“In a city of world-class artists and production crew hunting for the next gig, Andrew Cuomo made a TV ad the same way he wrote his housing policy: with AI,” Mamdani tweeted. “Then again, maybe a fake Cuomo is better than the real one?”
It’s clear that Cuomo, who had been in and out of New York politics for over forty years, harbors a personal hatred of Mamdani. Mamdani was an upstart, fringe candidate promising socialist reforms ranging from city-owned grocery stores to free bus rides, along with further affronts to the status quo like raising taxes on the rich and nearly doubling the minimum wage. When Cuomo lost the Democratic primary to Mamdani in June, it drove his campaign in the direction of increasingly ugly political attacks.
Again, it was impossible to ignore AI’s role. In late October, the Cuomo campaign unleashed, and then hastily took down, another AI-generated ad titled “Criminals for Zohran Mamdani” which was roundly criticized for being astonishingly racist. Its depictions include a deepfake of Mamdani eating rice with his hands — something that Mamdani’s openly racist critics on the right frequently attack him for — and a scene where a Black man wearing a keffiyeh and a facemask robs a store. The campaign blamed the blunder on a junior staffer.
Cuomo’s other AI ads were less outright hateful and more plainly bizarre. One called “I’m Just a Shill” parodied the “Schoolhouse Rock!” song “I’m Just a Bill,” with an AI Zohran lighting money on fire while being grilled by the anthropomorphic bill who randomly becomes pregnant, before ChatGPT in the form of a walking smartphone enters the fray to explain why Mamdani would be a bad candidate. On Halloween, Cuomo released another AI ad showing Mamdani trick-or-treating, before pulling his face off like a Scooby-Doo villain to reveal that he’s actually Republican candidate Curtis Sliwa in disguise. Meanwhile, the real Mamdani — still dressed in a suit — walked around Brooklyn to go trick-or-treating with folks on the street, taking photos, doling out candy, and garnering plenty of warm and real interactions.
Unfortunately for Cuomo, all his AI ammunition did was underscore how behind the times he was by — ironically — embracing futuristic new tech. But instead of seeming visionary, like Barack Obama’s embrace of social media during his 2008 campaign, it came off as cheap: Cuomo’s backers included a striking number of billionaires, but he couldn’t even bother to spend the money to shoot a real ad. At best, his efforts were something to jeer at.
Moreover, the AI attacks put Cuomo into an unflattering comparison for a man who is supposed to be swaying Democratic voters. No one is using AI imagery to mock its political foes more than president Donald Trump and his administration. The official Department of Homeland Security account has posted AI anime-styled images of immigrants crying while being deported, while Trump’s own account has shared a deepfake of himself piloting a fighter jet dumping a payload of diarrhea on peaceful protestors. Meanwhile, the broader far-right hemisphere has gladly jumped on citing AI imagery as evidence of minorities committing crimes.
That, in a nutshell, is where AI is at: instead of a symbol of a hopeful future, it’s become a fount of the toxic and bizarre — the stuff of dying campaigns and spiteful, decrepit avatars like Cuomo.
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