The US news is almost all concentrated on the candidates and synthetic issues of the mid-term election season, which traditionally kicks off on Labor Day. Two months of harangues on the radio.

     Wait a minute, who listens to radio any more? Where are political ads being shown these days?

     AI Overview says,

Traditional television still commands the largest share of U.S. political advertising at roughly 49% to 50% for broadcast linear TV.

Traditional vs. Streaming and Digital Breakdown:

Broadcast / Linear TV: ~49%
Connected TV (CTV) / Streaming: ~23%
Digital & Social Media (Meta, Google, etc.): ~13% to 15%
Cable TV / Radio / Other: ~12% to 15%

     We had our First Online Election in 2004 with the Bush/Gore video by JibJab. TV is still the major turf. 

But maybe this will be the first AI election. Maybe this will be the year of a disjuncture in the percentages. TV is for reaching to the lowest-common-denominator audience.

     This year, every campaign has AI on its staff. Hallucinations will abound. An election polling company last week revealed that the reason their polls were so wildly inaccurate for the Michigan Senatorial primary and the Wisconsin gubernatorial primary and the Los Angeles mayoralty primary was because they were intentionally false as an experiment to see how much campaigns could be influenced by false polls.

     Alongside burner phones, campaigns will be using burner poll companies. Phone surveys conducted by AI voices.

     The upcoming trick is when AI gets hold of your email inbox, reads all your mail, and sends you false messages that appear to be from and sound like your close pals.

     An article tells me, “Synthetic everything is warping America.” Synthetic, artificially generated data is not produced by real-world events. It’s typically created using algorithms.

     Synthetic data = false information. It’s everywhere around us now. If it’s plausible enough, people accept it. And then the AI-designed bridge collapses when the first real semi drives over it.