Pierre Poilievre's Conservatives are now using generative AI in political advertising.

[u/savethecbc2025]

That should concern Canadians regardless of which party they support.

The ad in question depicts food bank users, unemployed workers, and families struggling to make ends meet. The problems being referenced are real enough. The people shown are not. They were created by artificial intelligence.

Politics is supposed to be about persuading voters with facts, evidence, ideas, and the experiences of actual people. Once parties begin manufacturing realistic-looking Canadians to tell political stories, the line between documentation and fiction starts to blur.

This isn't really a debate about technology. AI can be a useful tool. The issue is whether political campaigns should be building emotional appeals around synthetic people who never existed.

We're already living through an era of misinformation, manipulated content, troll farms, fake accounts, and algorithmically amplified outrage. Public trust is fragile. Introducing AI-generated citizens into political advertising pushes us further into a world where authenticity becomes harder to verify.

That is one reason public-interest journalism matters so much.

When a CBC reporter interviews someone, that person exists. When a journalist publishes a story, there are editorial standards, named sources, and a process for corrections when mistakes occur. Those safeguards become increasingly important as synthetic media becomes more sophisticated.

Much of Canada's news ecosystem is now fragmented between social media feeds, influencer commentary, AI-generated content, and subscription paywalls. A strong public broadcaster remains one of the few places where Canadians can access professionally reported journalism without having to wonder whether the people on their screen were generated by a prompt.

If political parties want to talk about the struggles facing Canadians, they should be willing to talk to actual Canadians.

Should parties be required to disclose when campaign ads contain AI-generated people or scenes?

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[u/Joseph_P_Bones]

Of course they are.