A Trump-endorsed GOP candidate deleted a post from his campaign's social media accounts over the weekend after his opponent, incumbent Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), accused him of using artificial intelligence to generate it.
Ed Gallrein, a retired Navy SEAL challenging Massie in next week's primary, shared a message celebrating 'faith, family, patriotism' and 'small towns and communities' alongside photos from a campaign stop at Vanceburg Mayfest in Kentucky on Saturday.
However, as Lexington Herald-Leader reporter Austin Horn and Massie's campaign later highlighted, Gallrein's post included a strange opening line indicating the message originated from an AI chatbot. The caption began: 'Here's a polished social media post in your usual campaign/community-focused tone,' before describing the festival and 'neighbors coming together.'
While the AI-generated message appears to have been removed from the campaign's social media pages (along with a revised version on X), the initial opening line is still visible in a Google search snapshot of a campaign Facebook post.
Massie used the allegedly artificial caption to attack Gallrein in a post on Saturday. 'Now I know why woke Eddie won't debate me! He uses AI to write all his social media posts. Unfortunately for him, he's not smart enough to remove Grok's feedback to him,' Massie wrote alongside screenshots of the deleted post. HuffPost has reached out to the Gallrein campaign for comment.
AI drama has also seeped into other aspects of the GOP primary race for Kentucky's 4th congressional district. Massie, who holds a slight lead over Gallrein in polls ahead of next Tuesday's election, criticized what he called a 'disgusting and defamatory' AI-generated attack ad released by a Trump-aligned group last week.
The ad accuses Massie of being in a 'throuple' with Reps. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) — two progressive Democrats part of the so-called Squad — before showing fabricated footage of the congressman holding hands with and dining with the two women. The ad attempts to highlight Massie's votes against Trump's agenda, with a narrator describing such actions as 'worse than adultery.'
'It reeks of desperation, but they're hoping the older generation won't realize it's an AI generated lie,' Massie wrote of the ad.
