By Marty Swant • November 5, 2024 •
Generative AI hasn't had an outsized impact on 2024 presidential campaigns, but it still played a pivotal role in many aspects of political campaigns.
With Election Day finally here, it's worth looking at some of the ways ad-tech firms, political startups and political agencies have used large language models and machine learning. While AI has posed new dangers for election misinformation — something companies and governments have been all sought to detect and prevent — LLMs and ML were put to use helping political campaigns with content creation, audience analysis, voter targeting, and ad-buying.
Generative AI arrives for its first political season
Predictive models have been used for years, but 2024 is the first U.S. election in which generative AI has gained traction. Smaller campaigns have been using startups like Battleground AI, which helps progressive candidates in down-ballot races use AI to create and scale text-based ads for search, social, YouTube, and programmatic ads. Other new features help streamline ad creation and approval with editable ad mockups and an approval link feature for collaborations. A new content template store also offers designs from political advertising agencies like Adapt Digital, Studio Mosaic and Uplift Campaigns.
Candidates are using the platform to scale organic and paid media about topics they care about, according to Battleground AI co-founder Maya Hutchinson. In an interview with Digiday last month, she said total clients have quadrupled since the platform expanded beyond beta this summer. Although Meta has been used the most for testing and reaching voters, she noted the importance of diversification while also caring about the quality of conversations – not just quantity.
“[Candidates] want to keep iterating and finding better ways to talk to people and make a lot of variations,” Hutchinson said. “How can we start to test those different policy issues that we know are important to our voters? Let's allow more time to create messaging around multiple issues that resonate with our voters, not just hammering one thing all the time [that] people can easily drown out.”
One Battleground client is Pixels and Persuasion, which tested the platform for a school board race to see whether AI or humans could write better copy. After ingesting campaign materials, they found the AI-generated copy that was then edited by humans performed the best and even led to the AI drafting unexpected phrases.
“There's one that was talking about human flourishing, which isn't necessarily language that we would use in a political ad necessarily,” said Pixels and Persuasion CEO Myles Bugbee. “I've been in the [political] space for a while and I haven't seen the word ‘flourish' used, but that was a word we used in a headline that's performing well so far…It raises concepts and things that we may not necessarily have thought of.”
Another Battleground AI user is the political firm Blue Dot Consulting, which used it to help first-time candidate Kiana Fields campaign for Kentucky's state senate.
