AI Political Ads Flood Ohio Races While Lawmakers Stall on Regulation

The ad opens on an exasperated couple cleaning up after a birthday party. A woman complains about someone who won't leave, and her husband gestures at a rainbow-haired entertainer snoring on a chair. "No," she huffs. "Sherrod Brown." The screen cuts to a man who looks like the Democratic former U.S. senator, with his trademark disheveled gray hair and creased face, digging into a birthday cake while shooting a finger gun and shimmying his shoulders contentedly. It's not Sherrod Brown, or even an impersonator. It's an actor with Brown's actual face and neck superimposed on his body, thanks to artificial intelligence.

This $446,000 digital ad campaign from the Ohio Flyer PAC represents one of the first-ever Ohio political advertisements to employ AI-generated imagery, according to Federal Election Commission records. The PAC has ties to Republican U.S. Sen. Jon Husted's joint fundraising committee. At first glance, the deception is difficult to detect. But closer inspection reveals telltale artifacts: Brown's tie displays two different colors and patterns, his hand moves in unrealistic ways, the "canary" pin in his lapel appears as an amorphous blob, and one of the "Happy Birthday" signs hanging behind him only consists of the letter "H" before disappearing completely by the ad's end.

The Ohio Flyer PAC ad isn't the only Ohio political advertisement with artificially generated content. Last month, a digital ad from the American Conservative Fund, a super PAC funded by sports-betting giant DraftKings, featured an AI-generated animation portraying state Rep. Jim Hoops, a Napoleon Republican running for state Senate, when he was a high-school basketball star. Unlike the Brown ad, the Hoops ad used more generic AI animation and never showed Hoops's face. Neither advertisement included any mention that AI was used in their creation.

That's because Ohio, unlike a majority of other states, has no regulations at all governing the use of AI in political communications, from campaign ads to malicious "deepfakes" of candidates. Ohio, along with Alaska and Missouri, are the only three states without any regulations on deepfakes—not just for political ads, but in general, according to Cleveland.com reporting. There are also no AI disclosure requirements for political ads in federal law.

Five states—Colorado, Michigan, Minnesota, New York, and Washington state—require disclaimers whenever AI is used to depict people in political ads. Another two dozen or so states have some sort of regulation for any AI-generated "deepfake" content that is intended to deceive or mislead viewers into believing a political figure is doing something he or she is not. California had the strictest rules in the nation, mandating labels on digitally altered political ads, requiring large online platforms to remove deceptive AI content close to an election, and allowing people to file lawsuits for damages over political deepfakes. But those laws were overturned by federal judges over the past two years, on the grounds they violated federal law and/or creators' constitutional right to free speech.

Two Ohio House bills have been introduced this session to require disclaimers on "malicious deepfakes" in political ads and criminalize political "deepfakes" distributed within 90 days of an election, respectively. But so far, neither bill has gone anywhere—and even if they do, they wouldn't apply to ads like the anti-Brown and pro-Hoops commercials. The legislative gridlock is partly due to federal pushback. President Donald Trump signed an executive order aiming to allow AI companies to innovate without regulations weighing them down, creating an AI Litigation Task Force that would challenge any state laws that regulate AI.

Ohio is hardly the only state where political ad makers are turning to artificial intelligence. Earlier this year, the U.S. Senate campaign of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton's campaign released ads with AI animations of his primary opponent, incumbent U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, vacationing on a beach, as well as slow dancing with Democratic U.S. Rep. (and then-U.S. Senate candidate) Jasmine Crockett. Cornyn's campaign shot back with an AI-created digital ad targeting Paxton's alleged infidelity in a parody of the B-52s "Love Shack" music video. In 2023, a super PAC backing Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis' presidential campaign released ads that used AI to fabricate President Trump's voice and show Trump embracing Dr. Anthony Fauci. In January, Massachusetts Republican gubernatorial candidate Brian Shortsleeve's campaign used AI to create a fake "radio ad" featuring a synthesized version of Gov. Maura Healey's voice criticizing her own record.

Of those ads, only Paxton's included AI disclaimers at the end. Massachusetts has no AI disclosure requirement for political ads. Florida and Texas only require disclosure for certain deceptive or realistic AI-generated depictions of people, and Florida's rule did not take effect until mid-2024, well after the anti-Trump ads came out. Several experts in artificial intelligence and elections told reporters that political ad firms and campaigns are turning to AI for the same reason as so many other industries: Because it saves time and money while also expanding creative possibilities.

The physical experience of encountering these ads is what makes them particularly insidious. A voter scrolling through their phone during a commute might watch the Brown ad without noticing the glitching tie or the disappearing sign. The AI-generated content loads instantly, plays smoothly, and requires no extra clicks to verify authenticity. There's no friction in the user experience to signal something is off (which is the whole point, frankly). The technology has reached a threshold where casual viewers can't reliably distinguish synthetic from real without pausing, rewinding, and scrutinizing pixel-level details.

Ohio campaign spokeswoman Lauren Chou, in a statement, said "Jon Husted and his special interest allies are so desperate to distract" from his voting record that "they're literally resorting to false advertisements with fake images." The Plain Dealer and cleveland.com reached out for comment to Ohio Flyer PAC, The Strategy Group (the Columbus-area Republican political consulting firm that placed the Ohio Flyer PAC ad), and the American Conservative Fund, as well as to a Husted spokesman.

Whether Ohio lawmakers will actually pass meaningful AI disclosure requirements before the next election cycle remains uncertain. The bills introduced so far have stalled in committee, and even if they advance, the federal government's AI Litigation Task Force could challenge them. Campaigns have already demonstrated they can deploy AI-generated content without disclosure, and voters have already encountered it without knowing. The regulatory gap isn't closing—it's widening with every new ad that airs.

Artūras Malašauskas is an AI Systems Integrator with 20+ years of production-grade web engineering experience. He has designed, shipped, and scaled enterprise Python/PHP systems for logistics, SaaS, and public-sector clients. For the past year, he has focused exclusively on AI integrations: deploying open-source LLMs, building generative media pipelines (image, audio, video), and engineering multi-agent workflows for real production environments. His standard: reproducibility, security, cost-efficient inference—no vaporware. He documents and evaluates emerging AI tooling, separating verified capabilities from marketing noise. Technical editor at: muza-ai.eu, ai-verslas.lt, ai-naujinos.lt Connect on LinkedIn