GetUp posts a fake AI video to push a political ad ban

GetUp, the Australian advocacy group, released a fake AI video in which its incoming chief executive, Dan Ilic, turns himself into AI-generated versions of communications minister Anika Wells, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and One Nation leader Pauline Hanson, to press a ban on political ads built on lifelike AI-generated depictions.

Mumbrella reported the campaign on October 16 and said the video was posted to GetUp's Instagram page. Ilic made it to show how easily AI can manipulate political imagery, according to the report. Its depictions of the three politicians are Ilic's own likeness transformations, not footage of them.

"G'day, I'm Dan Ilic. But if I spend a few dollars on a Kazakh data center, I could turn myself into communications minister Anika Wells and I could make her do unspeakable things," Ilic says in the video. He adds later: "AI is now so powerful, it can make unbelievable things believable and accelerate deception to an industrial scale."

Wells' office confirmed to Mumbrella that the minister did not appear in the video. GetUp's petition asks to ban political ads that feature lifelike AI-generated depictions of people or events that never existed, and calls for mandatory disclosures on AI-generated political content. "Parties can say what they like and argue as hard as they want. They just can't fake the footage," GetUp said in the petition. It had more than 17,300 signatures toward a target of 25,000 at the time of publication.

Australia's existing rules around political advertising require certain campaign material to identify who authorized it, rather than whether its imagery was artificially generated, according to Mumbrella.

The GetUp campaign follows One Nation's AI-generated Victorian election ad, "Coming Out", which Mumbrella reported featured depictions of a machete-wielding African man and a man of Middle Eastern descent wearing what appears to be a suicide bomb vest. Political advertising is exempt from the advertising industry's Ad Standards system, and because the ad ran only online it sat outside the Australian Communications and Media Authority's rules for political advertising on television and radio, Mumbrella reported. GetUp also singled out Fix Victoria, which ran AI-generated advertisements depicting crime and disorder ahead of the Victorian election and reportedly spent nearly $100,000 advertising on Google and Meta in August, according to Mumbrella.

Guardian Australia reported on October 9 that the Australian Communications and Media Authority cannot act on that kind of content, and that electoral commissions can regulate only misinformation about the electoral process rather than false or distasteful material. The same report said the federal Labor government has so far shrugged off calls from inside and outside parliament to ban AI-generated content in election periods. Senator David Pocock has pushed for two years for the government to address generative AI in election campaigns, the Guardian reported, and 35,000 people signed his petition for Labor to legislate a ban on deepfakes in elections before the next federal election. The parliament's joint committee on AI heard witnesses that week say action was overdue, the Guardian reported.

For people who make AI video, the petition and the inquiries point at disclosure rather than prohibition. GetUp's first demand covers political ads that put lifelike AI depictions of people or events that never existed into election messaging, not synthetic production on its own, and its second demand is a labeling rule. If the electoral matters committee endorses mandatory disclosure, the agencies and freelance creators who produce political spots could face new requirements to declare what was fabricated and with what tools, though no such rule exists yet.

The Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters' final report into the 2025 federal election, which will consider the use of generative AI in political advertising, is due in November.