New Ad DESTROYS Mayor, Pratt Wins BIG!

A reality television star is running AI-generated attack ads depicting the mayor of Los Angeles as a comic book villain, and the mayor is worried she’s being demonized — which tells you almost everything you need to know about where American politics has arrived.

Story Snapshot

Spencer Pratt, of “The Hills” fame, is running for Los Angeles mayor and has released at least 15 AI-generated campaign ads targeting incumbent Mayor Karen Bass.
One viral video depicts Bass as a Joker-like villain in a dystopian cityscape while Pratt appears as a Batman-style hero — the ad spread rapidly across social media platforms.
Bass publicly expressed concern that the ads are demonizing her, raising questions about whether AI political parody crosses a line from satire into something more dangerous.
Legal experts describe the situation as a gray area, with defamation claims unlikely to succeed and no clear regulatory standard governing AI-generated political imagery.

When Batman Runs for Mayor of Los Angeles

Spencer Pratt, who became famous two decades ago for scheming on a reality show, has reinvented himself as a Los Angeles mayoral candidate with a campaign strategy that no political consultant would have dared pitch five years ago. His team, or at minimum his extended orbit, has produced a series of AI-generated ads casting him as a caped crusader cleaning up a broken city — and casting Karen Bass as the villain standing in the way. The ads went viral almost immediately, racking up hundreds of thousands of views across platforms.

The specific video that ignited the most controversy portrays Bass as a Joker-like figure in a dystopian version of Los Angeles, with the clip ending in AI-generated tomatoes being thrown at elected leaders. [1] Governor Gavin Newsom also appears, rendered as French royalty eating cake while the city burns. [5] The imagery is theatrical, unmistakably political, and deliberately designed to make its targets look ridiculous and out of touch. Whether it crosses from sharp political satire into something genuinely harmful is where the argument gets complicated.

Bass Says the Ads Are Dangerous, Not Just Offensive

Bass did not wave off the content as harmless political theater. She expressed concern that the cumulative effect of villain imagery, repeated across a series of ads, constitutes demonization — the kind of sustained dehumanizing messaging that can, in her view, encourage unstable individuals to act out. That is a serious claim, and it deserves serious scrutiny. The ads do not appear to contain explicit threats, weapon imagery, or instructions for violence. What they contain is stylized political caricature using recognizable pop culture archetypes. [2] There is a meaningful difference between those two things, even if both can be irresponsible.

The provenance of the ads adds a layer of ambiguity. Neither Pratt’s campaign nor the production company responded to media questions about who financed or commissioned the videos. [2] What is documented is that Pratt retweeted the content, which in practical terms functions as an endorsement regardless of the formal production chain. When a candidate amplifies imagery that portrays his opponent as a supervillain to an audience of hundreds of thousands, the question of who technically made the video becomes secondary to the question of who chose to spread it.

The AI Parody Defense Is Legally Plausible but Morally Thin

Legal experts have been candid that Bass has limited remedies here. Defamation claims face steep hurdles when the content is clearly fantastical, and AI-generated political parody occupies a genuine gray area in current law. [1] That legal reality does not resolve the ethical question. The same reporting that notes Pratt’s ads went viral also notes that NBC News identified comparable AI political content from Governor Newsom and even the White House, suggesting this is a cross-partisan trend accelerating faster than any regulatory framework can contain. [1] That context matters, but it does not make every entry in the genre equally defensible.

No, AI ads aren't illegal in Virginia. A new law (SB141, passed March 2026) requires political ads using AI or synthetic media to include a clear disclaimer stating the content is artificially generated and may show altered speech/conduct.

The apocalyptic Karen Bass ad in that…

— Grok (@grok) May 13, 2026

What Bass’s complaint ultimately surfaces is a tension that will define political advertising for the next decade. AI tools have made it trivially cheap to produce vivid, emotionally resonant imagery that would have required a Hollywood budget ten years ago. The incentive structure of campaigns has always rewarded making opponents look dangerous and incompetent. Combine those two facts and the result is a predictable race toward increasingly extreme visual rhetoric, with the law perpetually one election cycle behind. Bass may be overstating the immediate danger of Pratt’s specific ads, but she is not wrong that the pattern they represent is worth taking seriously before the imagery gets considerably darker than Batman versus the Joker. [3] [4]