Bot's new

If you're worried artificial intelligence will end up tainting politics and news reporting, it already is.

-  Peter Griffin

The National Party's mini scandal in May over its use of AIgenerated images in political attack ads is an eerie portent of things to come.

The images, probably the product of Midjourney, an artificial-intelligence-driven image generator that responds to users' text prompts, looked like the sort of fare served up by stock photo providers Shutterstock and iStock.

But the odd gaze of the woman looking apprehensively out a window in one image caused many to take a second glance. The strange-looking faces under the ski masks of the thieves raiding a jewellery store were really what gave the game away. National had to own up to the fact that they were indeed Al-generated-good but not perfect. The party defended them as "an innovative way to drive our social media".

National is right - they are innovative. But they are also troubling, and represent the new wave of Algenerated content quickly filling up the web that is going to see all of us experience a sense of cognitive dissonance as we consume words, images, videos and audio clips that don't seem completely real.