Senate GOP committee shares AI-made video of Schumer reveling in government shutdown

• Punchbowl News reported the quote from Schumer on Oct. 9 based on an interview with Schumer on Capitol Hill.
• Schumer was said to be describing the why he thought the political momentum was in Democrats' favor on the shutdown.

Our thought bubble: No laws ban what the NRSC did here, though there is bipartisan support for the type of watermarking seen in the bottom right corner of the video.

• If this were an ad, the tiny amount of FEC regulation around digital election advertising would not have banned this sort of thing.
• It marks a new normal in how organizations are willing to use AI to spread their messages.

The big picture: Since the release of OpenAI's Sora app last month, realistic deepfakes are flooding social media. One deepfake debunker is making it his mission to explain how to spot AI video as a key part of media literacy for everyone.

• "If you're tricked by an AI possum eating Halloween candy, that doesn't mean you're stupid," Jeremy Carrasco told Axios in an interview last week.
• "That's a learning opportunity for when the politician is being deepfaked by AI."

The bottom line: It's not just that a lot more deepfakes are coming, it's that they're looking a lot more real.