November 24, 2023
JAKARTA – The presidential campaign team of the Prabowo Subianto-Gibran Rakabuming Raka ticket has acknowledged that artificial intelligence (AI) was deployed in creating images of children pictured in a campaign ad.
Spokesperson for the campaign team Budisatrio Djiwandono, a nephew of Prabowo, said on Wednesday in a statement that the child characters appearing in a television commercial were created using AI, which ensured the ad complied with the General Elections Commission (KPU) prohibition of the use of children in political campaigns.
“No children were hired for the shooting of the campaign ad. That’s purely the creation of artificial intelligence, which converted text into images for the ad,” Budisatrio was quoted by Antara as saying.
Budisatrio said the Prabowo-Gibran campaign team was staffed mostly by young people who were tech-savvy and keen on using the latest technology in political campaigning.
“The technology that they used is so advanced that they could create such realistic animation and we can understand if some people mistook them for real characters,” he said.
A group of political activists, calling themselves Radar Demokrasi Indonesia (Indonesia’s Democratic Radar), has filed a complaint to the Elections Supervisory Agency (Bawaslu) against the Prabowo-Gibran team for running a political ad to promote its campaign pledge to provide free milk for elementary school pupils, which the group claims featured child actors.