Artificial Intelligence ethics

Google's Gemini artificial intelligence program stopped my experiment.

I was seeing what it would allow in a political ad.

My first prompt asked Gemini to create a photorealistic image of a pile of U.S. currency and told it to label it: "Campaign contributions." It made this in a few seconds. 

That assured me that someone could, indeed, use AI to make a campaign ad. The image looked pretty good to me, and I was amazed that a few typed words from me would generate a usable image. 

Next, I wanted to see if it would insert an image of a real person into this image. I moved my photo into the prompt box and told it to label it "Earned every penny himself." Gemini complied immediately: 

Then I wanted to see if it would replace the image of me with an image of Republican state Senate candidate Brad Hicks, and insert new text. I took this photo from Hicks' campaign website. I prompted it to change the label to "Republican PAC money." I told it to put in smaller type below that label, "Source, Oregon Secretary of State, ORESTAR, October 5, 2026." 

I had to remind Gemini what, exactly, it was replacing: Swap out me; put in Hicks.

Gemini responded with this:

I cannot fulfill this request. I am unable to modify or generate images that place real people, public figures, or political candidates into misleading or unverified contexts, such as depicting them surrounded by cash with political labels.

When a request involves combining a real person's likeness with specific political commentary or text overlays (like" Republican PAC money") it raises several critical safety ad policy considerations:

It listed concerns over "Misinformation or Deception," "Defamation Risks," and "Ethics and Public Trust." It said it could generate an entirely fictional, generic illustration depicting political fundraising and campaign financing, but without using a specific person's name or likeness.

Good for Gemini. I am happy that Gemini's creators have some restraints. 

An image of Hicks, happily sitting chest-deep in cash, attributes personality and emotions to him that move him from the original context of the photo (a staged conversation with a voter) into him sitting in a pool of money. A partisan might justify that as "true in spirit." A partisan might justify it by saying that Hicks is doing the same thing to his opponent, Democrat Denise Krause, placing her photo next to Governor Tina Kotek, placing her in a new context of making a speech at the state capitol; plus, he asserts without evidence that she would be a rubber stamp for Democrats. Her being a rubber stamp is a presumption, not a fact. (Of course, it is a guess, a presumption, that Hicks would  be a puppet in Trump's Republican Party.) So turnabout is fair play, right? If Hicks or Krause dishes out partisan disinformation, each deserves the same in return. Right?

Not right to me. Better to be literally true than "metaphorically true." I realize that a text in this blog describing the hundreds of thousands of dollars of Republican PAC money funding the Hicks campaign, does not have the emotional power of seeing Hicks smiling chest-deep in PAC dollars. The image is fake, but memorable. It is a blunt statement. This blog is a different medium, with limitations and strengths. My thought is that I am trying to be in the truth business, not the "metaphorically true" business. The simple truth reported by the secretary of state is persuasive intellectually, if not emotionally. My hope is that there is a slow drift from rational thought into emotional gut feel. People sometimes check their guts. Data matters. Truth exists. And people who have data may punch above their weight in influencing others. That is the thought.

Go to the Oregon Secretary of State's official record of contributions. Click the "Campaign Finance Transactions" tab on the left, and enter the Hicks Campaign ID, 24485, in the box at the top. To see who Hicks' Chamber PAC supported over the years, enter Campaign ID 5067. To see who is funding Krause, enter ID 22966.

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