Glasgow candidate’s ‘illustrative’ AI campaign videos don’t show real events

An independent candidate in the Scottish parliamentary elections has told Full Fact that “illustrative” AI-generated videos he shared of himself meeting voters, speaking at rallies and visiting a primary school and hospital don’t show real events.

Two videos show Arzoo Waqqar Abdullah, who is standing for the Glasgow Southside constituency, carrying out various different campaign activities.

The posts feature a disclaimer which describes each video as an “illustrative AI scene”. In the original posts however, this was only mentioned at the end of the caption, which in many cases was only visible if users clicked “see more” on the caption of the posts. It’s therefore possible some voters may have seen these videos without seeing any warning that they aren’t real.

After we contacted Mr Abdullah, he removed the original posts and re-uploaded the videos with the disclaimer that they were “illustrative AI scenes” more prominently displayed at the top of the captions. We’re grateful to him for engaging with us.

Mr Abdullah told us the scenes depicted in the video were “not real events”, and said: “The videos were always meant to be illustrative and represent my goals—things I aspire to do—rather than past events.”

It’s important that all candidates include clear transparency markers on their campaign material and, in this case, Full Fact believes Mr Adbullah should have included a prominent label at the outset to highlight that his videos had been created using AI. A requirement for transparency markers is among Full Fact’s recommendations for stronger rules to deal with political deepfakes in the Representation of the People Bill, which is currently before Parliament at Westminster.

We spotted Mr Abdullah’s videos thanks to Full Fact’s AI tools, which are monitoring claims made on social media by over a thousand candidates standing across England, Scotland and Wales in the May elections.

What does the Electoral Commission say?

We shared Mr Abdullah’s original posts with the Electoral Commission—the body responsible for regulating election campaigns. It told us: “We expect anyone using AI-generated campaign material to do so in a way that does not mislead voters, and to label it clearly so that voters know how it has been created.”

The Electoral Commission is currently piloting a “deepfake detection” system which “monitors online content for deepfake audio and video intended to mislead voters about the electoral process or falsely depict candidates”.

It told us that because each of the videos in question was labelled as an “illustrative AI scene”, they would not have fallen under the scope of its pilot, however.

There are a number of clues that the videos were made using AI—for example, in the background there are buses that blend into each other and shops with invented names, gibberish signs or which look nothing like their real-world counterparts. Full Fact’s AI tools also identified the clips as having a SynthID (Google AI’s watermark).

Our guide to spotting AI content, and toolkit, can help you spot content that might not be all that it seems.