Anyone strolling through Raleigh this weekend may hear the voice of Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson blasting from an electronic billboard on the side of a truck.
“MLK was a communist,” Robinson’s voice says, speaking over an image of himself pointing into the face of the revered leader. “And the Civil Rights Movement was CRAP!” he adds, edited into the bus seat next to Rosa Parks.
On another slide, his voice calls the affordable care act “an effort to enslave everybody” while he poses, tin hat perched on his bald head, in front of an Illuminati conspiracy board.
But Robinson, Republican candidate for governor, didn’t sit down to record those lines for the ads. The sounds weren’t even spliced together from past clips. Instead, his voice was digitally created—to read quotes and beliefs taken from his old Facebook posts, rallies, and media appearances—with AI.
The campaign is the latest from Americans for Prosparody (not to be confused with Koch brothers-backed conservative Americans for Prosperity), a satire political action committee (PAC) founded and funded by Raleigh millionaire and activist Todd Stiefel.
“Too many people aren’t familiar with the crazy things that have come out of Robinson’s mouth,” said Stiefel in a press release. “These billboards will help educate voters about just how extreme, dangerous and downright weird he is.”
Even by the standards of a political communications world ravaged by Donald Trump and the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, the ads running in Raleigh are pretty wild. But the Americans for Prosparody ads that didn’t make it onto the truck are even more jaw-dropping.
In one, Robinson, in a red onesie with devil horns and wings, confesses that he is a murderer because he paid for his now-wife’s abortion. In another, he holds a severed head and a cross and tells the viewer to “take the head of thy enemy in God’s name!”
All four ads are running on Facebook. Stiefel tells INDY that the truck company, worried about the safety of their personnel, declined to run the abortion and severed head ads.
During the spring’s primary, Americans for Prosparody ran several similar ads focused on Robinson before he was officially the Republican nominee. Those ads featured the more cartoonish “Mark Rottenson” character, with a villainous mustache and an old-timey hat. (According to PAC filings, those mobile billboards cost $66,000).
“I wanted it to be as obvious as possible that [Rottenson] was parody and satire,” says Stiefel. But the PAC quickly ran into another problem—lieutenant governor isn’t exactly a position with a lot of star power, so many people didn’t know who Robinson was, or wouldn’t have recognized his likeness, to begin with.
That’s why the current campaign features Robinson without any props. It also means the PAC has to be more careful about the script it writes for the AI voice, as the imitation is certainly good enough to make a passerby stop and wonder if Robinson really said that.
For the most part, Robinson did. But by using some real quotes alongside some satirical content, all in Robinson’s AI voice, some of the ads blur the line between reality and parody.
In March, that debatable distinction had both Democrats and Republicans speaking out against the Rottenson campaign.
Democratic gubernatorial candidate Josh Stein’s campaign told WRAL that “any use of AI to mislead voters is unequivocally wrong and has no place in this campaign,” while Robinson campaign spokesperson Michael Lonergan told INDY that “Stiefel’s low-rent website is full of fake clips and outrageous lies. North Carolina voters will see right through it.”
Lonergan also called the site “a typical Democrat smear campaign,” and pointed out that Stiefel is a major Stein donor. (Stiefel is an unaffiliated voter, but has donated at least $40,000 to Democratic candidates and PACs in 2024 alone and at least $18,000 to Stein since 2016.)
For one 2023 donation, Stiefel listed his occupation as “provocateur.”
Stiefel says the current billboard campaign cost $23,000, and will run through the month. The press release noted that the ads are “part of a larger buy to be announced in the coming days.”
Reach Reporter Chase Pellegrini de Paur at [email protected]. Comment on this story at [email protected].
The post Raleigh Millionaire Launches AI Attack Campaign Targeting Mark Robinson appeared first on INDY Week.