AAP FACTCHECK – US Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris has released a “disturbing” campaign advert showing a mother of an unruly child who wishes she’d had an abortion, social media users claim.
This is false. The video has been taken from a 2021 UK insurance advertisement. The voice-over purportedly of Ms Harris has also likely been altered or generated by artificial intelligence (AI).
The claim appears in a Facebook post that says: “DISTURBING: New Kamala Harris Campaign Ad Depicts Mother Who Wishes She Had An Abortion”.
It includes a video of a boy parading around a house in a dress, breaking furniture and generally wreaking havoc, while a bewildered mother looks on. It includes a Harris-Walz campaign logo in the corner of the screen.
The video features a voice-over purportedly of Ms Harris talking about the importance of protecting abortion rights.
“For so many women it’s a future they didn’t choose, a reality they’re not prepared for, but now the right to decide is being taken from them,” the narrator says.
“We cannot stand by while freedom is stripped away. We must protect a woman’s right to choose her own path, for herself, for her family, for her future, so we don’t wind up living with a child like this.”
The voiceover ends with a woman laughing.
The video, however, is taken from a 2021 home insurance ad by UK retailer John Lewis & Partners. That ad was pulled from air because the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority deemed it to be misleading.
Many of the social media posts sharing the video have copied text from, or linked to, a post on X (formerly Twitter) by Chase Geiser.
Mr Geiser is a host on InfoWars, a platform that is a frequent source of misinformation and owned by US conspiracy theorist Alex Jones.
AAP FactCheck was unable to find any evidence that Ms Harris used the phrases in the video’s voiceover and experts said it was likely generated or manipulated by AI.
Dr Andrew Lensen, a senior lecturer in artificial intelligence at Victoria University of Wellington, told AAP FactCheck it wasn’t possible to determine whether the voiceover was AI-generated based on the audio alone. However, he said “looking at the wider context and ad source, it’s highly likely it is not her”.
Dr Lensen said an audible blip 45 seconds into the video was a potential flag it had been AI-generated, although this could also be a “voice crack”.
“Though, on balance, you can’t imagine the PR team would release an advert with a voice crack in it,” Dr Lensen said.
Allyn Robins, an AI expert at Wellington think tank Brainbox, said while it was difficult to be definitive, “the evidence points overwhelmingly to this being an AI voiceover”.
“Just examining the audio, the intonation is strange and stilted, there’s not much of a sense of continuity or ‘flow’ between sentences, there’s a lack of emotiveness that would be very odd for a politician wading into such a charged issue,” Mr Robins said.
She added that there were also a number of glitches in the audio that were “the hallmark of AI generated voice work”.
AAP FactCheck ran the video through an online AI detector which found “substantial evidence” the audio had been manipulated by AI due to “semantic inconsistencies”.
The video has also been debunked by PolitiFact.
The Verdict
False – The claim is inaccurate.
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