National has a history of difficulty with respecting the intellectual property rights of artists.
Who can forget 2014 when National chose an Eminemesque tune for its main video advertisement. Eminem was not impressed.
Stephen Joyce thought that the arrangement was pretty legal. The courts thought that the tune was really, really, really Eminemesque, so Eminemesque that use of the tune breached Slim Shady’s copyright.
There are other instances, the use of Coldplay’s Clocks in 2008, a Dylanesque song in 2017 and a Katy Perry song in 2022. There was also that occasion when a Simon Bridges Chris Bishop car kareoke session involved potentially serial copyright breaches of songs by Elton John, Pearl Jam and Franz Ferdinand.
Fast forward to this week and National has chosen a new way to avoid pesky copyright claims and also avoid the reality that no ordinary kiwi would ever consent to being in one of their ads, they decided to use artificial intelligence generated images.
They also came up with this image to highlight their bonding policy to attract more nurses and midwives but for some strange reason chose to use a couple of AI generated models rather than real humans.
Don’t they realise that the health system will not be helped by their AI generated ghost nurses?
Yesterday National leader Christopher Luxon was asked if National was using AI generated images in their ads.
He said that he was not sure.
I don’t know about the topic in the sense of I am not sure. You are making an accusation that we are using it, I am not sure that we are. I will need to talk to our team.”
Note twitter exploded on Monday night over the allegations and Luxon had plenty of time to be briefed on the subject. Which you would normally expect in the heat of an election campaign.
Put to one side the ethics of using fake people and dodgy attempts to avoid copyright what surprised me is that Luxon had no idea that the issue was brewing.
And he expects to become the leader of the Country?
Helen Clark used to be on top of the detail of everything.
A Government appointee could not fart in the Koru lounge without her knowing about it.
But with Christopher Luxon the standards are more loose. Which is fine, but when kiwis think about who they want to be in control of the country my personal preference is the person who is on top of the detail, not the person who is blissfully unaware of his party’s campaign strategy.
And National have blundered into an area that has huge ethical issues.
Even Jenna Lynch can see the problem. From Newshub:
I spoke to a copyright law expert who says by using AI National’s probably in the clear as they haven’t used any actually copyrighted material.
While what National has done with these pictures is relatively harmless, AI could be a slippery slope, we don’t want politics descending into the world of deep fakes, videos made to look and sound like real life people.
National says AI is an innovative way to drive its social media and would be used responsibly. Labour’s view is it won’t use AI because it wants to run “an honest and upfront campaign”.
And therein lies National’s potential political problem with this.
Labour is aware that Luxon has a trust problem as shown in our Newshub-Reid Research poll and we’ve already seen them trying to make hay with the “can’t trust National” line.
National using fake imagery doesn’t exactly conjure thoughts of honesty and trust, feeding directly into Labour’s lines.
Another day from hell for Luxon and more evidence that he cannot be trusted with the job. I suspect that right now he really wants to lose himself.
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