Something’s a bit off, it could be the textures, the voice or the person in the clip has too many fingers, but your gut often tells you a video is AI generated.

But Kelowna city council candidate said it doesn’t matter.

JC Rathwell has posted roughly 40 AI generated campaign videos on YouTube talking about the issues in Kelowna he intends to solve if he gets elected in the municipal election this fall.

This is new territory for voters, and legislators haven’t set up any guard rails.

Most of Rathwell’s videos are labeled as AI with a small note in the corner and “made with AI” written at the bottom of the video’s description. Rathwell hasn’t decided whether he’s going to run for mayor or city council.

Rathwell said he sits down with his AI agent to brainstorm video ideas, then he gets it to make a video and post it online within an hour and a half.

“Her name’s Lisa. And I basically just talk to her and I say, I want to do something about the homeless,” he told iNFOnews.ca. “Then a script is made up, created from that 15 minute conversation. The highlights are taken out of there. All my stuttering and all my quick talking is erased. And a one to two minute video is created with me as an AI avatar.”

Rathwell is familiar with AI since he has an AI agent business that tries to help local companies integrate AI into their workflow.

This isn’t his first time he’s run for Kelowna council having run several unsuccessful races throughout the 2000s.

Elections BC’s biggest job in a municipal election is to enforce the Local Election Campaign Financing Act.

Elections BC’s senior director of communications Danielle Johnston said there isn’t anything in there about AI.

“There are no rules or regulations in (the act) around AI, including the use of AI in developing ads or campaigning,” Johnston said in an emailed statement.

There’s an Elections BC Political Campaign Code of Practice but it’s voluntary and it only applies to provincial parties, not municipal candidates. The code says campaigns should “never misrepresent artificial intelligence as a human being.”

“The code was developed to support fair campaign principles that go above and beyond the legislative requirements,” Elections BC said.

Trevor McAleese is running against Rathwell for Kelowna city council and told iNFOnews.ca he’s concerned about the lack of regulation around AI use in elections.

“Desperately, we do need some sort of regulation and election policy around preventing this sort of thing and having some kind of mechanism to clamp down on it,” he said.

He also doesn’t think it’s a good way to connect with voters, especially since some of the YouTube videos only have a handful of views.

“I don’t understand why somebody who would be pitching themselves as a representative of the public wouldn’t be doing everything that they could to come across as an authentic person. . . instead turn into generative AI to crank out something that is at best just a quick way of getting a video out there and at worst quite misleading,” McAleese said.

Rathwell said he checked with his AI agent Lisa and figured there was nothing stopping him from making as many AI videos as he wanted to.

He doesn’t think anti-AI sentiment will work against him either since he’s a “full-on conservative” and he thinks left-wing voters are the ones against AI.

“I believe the target market I’m going after, I don’t think they care. I think the people that are woke and don’t want that technology and don’t want change and want the status quo, those ones are not going to want to vote for me anyways,” he said.

Angus Reid conducted a survey and found that 96 per cent of British Columbians are concerned that AI-generated misinformation is going to be a serious problem.

A few people have reached out to Rathwell confused about whether the videos are real or AI.

Rathwell said using AI to make videos is easier and cheaper for him.

“I’m not trying to mislead people. This is the best way to get my message out. I could never get in front of a camera and speak and get my thoughts out properly,” he said.

Click here for Rathwell’s campaign website.