ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
In Germany this weekend, the state of Brandenburg, which surrounds the capital, Berlin, will hold its elections. And a leading far-right party there is posting campaign ads generated by artificial intelligence that critics call racist. As NPR's Berlin correspondent Rob Schmitz reports, the ads mark new territory for how right-wing parties are utilizing AI.
ROB SCHMITZ, BYLINE: The campaign ad begins with a choice.
(SOUNDBITE OF POLITICAL AD)
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: (Speaking German).
SCHMITZ: You decide, offers the narrator, whether your hometown keeps its weekly market or whether it's overrun with drug dealers, whether the trains run on time or whether the station becomes a crime scene, whether Brandenburg has any prospects at all or whether living standards decline and the state is overrun with foreigners. This is a political ad made by the Alternative for Deutschland, or AFD party, which is polling in first place in the German state of Brandenburg.
ALISA SCHELLENBERG: They use images that are all AI generated and that are almost kind of a translation of the aesthetic that has been used during the Nazi era.
SCHMITZ: Alisa Schellenberg is a political editor at the newspaper Die Zeit. She says the AFD's AI-generated ads portray Germans the way Nazi propaganda did - blond, prominent cheekbones, broad chested, perfect posture. But in these ads, the AFD then juxtaposes this with Middle Eastern-looking men and women, pictured in the shadows, dressed in track suits and burkas, selling drugs and taking over German streets.
SCHELLENBERG: What they're trying to do is to show, like, when you're German, you're on the good side and you're handsome or beautiful, and when you're a immigrant, you are even maybe ugly and you're standing in the shadows. And this is the dichotomy that they're using to convey their message.
SCHMITZ: When contacted by NPR for comment, the Brandenburg chairman of the AFD, Rene Springer, wrote a statement that said, quote, "just like in the United States, decreasing levels of public safety in Germany also goes hand-in-hand with increased immigration. So far, East Germany has been able to avoid the criminality of West German multiculturalism, but mass immigration is now bringing these problems to our region," the statement says, adding, "for this reason, we want to show voters you can choose the Western way of too many foreigners or domestic security."
Schellenberg says what makes AFD's ads unique is not their anti-immigrant, racist tone. The AFD is infamous for this rhetoric and is under domestic surveillance for the threat it poses to Germany's democracy. But it's that the ads were generated by artificial intelligence software, something she says is painfully obvious.
SCHELLENBERG: I think it's possible by now to generate AI videos that are far more precise. There are a lot of glitches in the depiction of the people. When you look at the women in the burka, there's one that is just wearing a yellow cape, which doesn't make sense.
SCHMITZ: The people in these ads are also off. Their eyes don't convey emotion like real humans. As a result, Schellenberg says, everyone in these ads looks a little creepy, and it's clear the party made them on a small budget. Despite this, the ads have received hundreds of thousands of views on social media. She says AI appears to be the new frontier for right-wing political ads.
SCHELLENBERG: Authoritarian populace parties all over the world employ the same social media strategies. The use of AI-generated images with the AFD in Germany is also used by the Rassemblement National in France. And we also see that Donald Trump is employing AI-generated images. We see that Elon Musk is experimenting with AI to convey disinformation.
SCHMITZ: What's surprising to Schellenberg and other political analysts about these ads, though, is why they're allowed in the first place. German laws strictly prohibit discrimination based on race, especially by established political parties. Yet when NPR contacted the offices of the federal and Brandenburg state prosecutor's office, as well as the state interior ministry, nobody seemed to know who was responsible for policing this type of ad. And that's why, say political analysts, the far-right will continue to use AI-generated ads like these in the future.
Rob Schmitz, NPR News, Berlin. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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