Wisconsin Congressman Responds to Deepfake Cease-and-Desist with AI-Generated Duck
Published · updated · curated by AI Is Going Just Great
Source: wpr.org ↗
"You are airing this false content to attempt to fool the voters of Wisconsin into believing she said something she did not to harm her reputation for your own political gain."
U.S. Rep. Derrick Van Orden has been posting AI-generated videos to X showing his Democratic challenger Rebecca Cooke saying things she never said, including that she's running for Congress "to take advantage of as much corruption as possible and give every illegal alien free healthcare." The videos carry automatic labels identifying them as made with Grok Imagine, xAI's image and video generator. On Sept. 30, Cooke's attorneys sent Van Orden a cease-and-desist letter warning that the videos may constitute defamation under Wisconsin law, and that they were "monitoring" his accounts.
Van Orden's response was to post another Grok-generated video, this one featuring a red AI duck shouting "Cease and desist!" His campaign described Cooke's legal action as a "full blow tantrum." Cooke, for her part, noted the irony that the deepfakes were produced using the same AI infrastructure Van Orden had supported with federal tax breaks.