Andrew Cuomo, the former New York governor who resigned in disgrace in 2021, launched a new political ad on Wednesday filled with AI-generated depictions of himself doing various jobs.
Cuomo is running for mayor of New York as an independent in a long-shot bid against Zohran Mamdani, who instantly pounced on the ad. Mamdani ridiculed the video but suggested that maybe an AI Cuomo would be better than the real thing.
“I’m Andrew Cuomo and I could pretend to do a lot of jobs. But I know what I know and I know what I don’t know. And I do know how to make government work,” Cuomo says in the new ad.
AI-generated video in the ad shows Cuomo driving a subway train, standing on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, and holding a curtain open on Broadway, before the real Cuomo, who’s talking directly to the camera, gets into what he promises to do as mayor.
“I’ll hire 5,000 new cops to partner with local community groups and keep our families safe. And we’ll get the homeless off the streets and into the help they desperately need,” Cuomo continues.
“There are a lot of jobs I can’t do. But I’m ready to be your mayor on day one,” the real Cuomo says as viewers see an AI-generated video of him washing windows.
The suggestion seems to be that Mamdani is only pretending to know how to be mayor and that New York needs a guy like Cuomo who’s held a high-level position. Mamdani has served as a member of the New York State Assembly since 2021, representing a district that includes Queens.
The new Cuomo ad has received about 600 views on YouTube despite being up for over 4 hours at the time of this writing. The ad has just 28,000 views on X and 15,000 on Instagram. Oddly, it doesn’t appear to have been posted on Facebook, presumably the social network that his aging target audience is spending the most time on.
Mamdani, who’s leading Cuomo in the polls, mocked the former governor on Bluesky, first invoking the fears over AI’s role in taking jobs away from artists and video production staff.
“In a city of world-class artists and production crew hunting for the next gig, Andrew Cuomo made a TV ad the same way he wrote his housing policy: with AI,” Mamdani wrote on Bluesky.
“Then again, maybe a fake Cuomo is better than the real one?” the Democratic candidate continued.
Cuomo resigned as governor in Oct. 2021 after an investigation by the state Attorney General found that he sexually harassed at least 11 women, including state employees. Mamdani won the Democrats’ New York mayoral primary and is polling at 47%, according to the latest available poll conducted by Fox News from Sept. 18-22. That same poll shows Cuomo at 29% and Curtis Sliwa at 11%. Eric Adams was at 7% in that poll, though he’s since dropped out.
AI video has swamped social media platforms like X, Facebook, and Instagram in recent years, but it’s still relatively rare to see it used in official campaign ads. Neither President Donald Trump nor Democratic challenger Kamala Harris deployed AI campaign ads in any serious way during the 2024 presidential election.
One of the most bizarre recent examples of an AI video used outside of an official campaign comes from President Donald Trump who, posted a video over the weekend about a conspiracy theory known as “med beds.”
Adherents to the QAnon worldview believe that med beds can magically restore anyone to perfect health and even regenerate lost limbs. And Trump posted a video of himself to Truth Social as an AI figure promoting med beds as something that was coming soon. Trump’s account later deleted the absolutely wild video.
Cuomo’s new ad includes a text disclaimer at the bottom reading, “This political communication was created with the assistance of artificial intelligence.” And it seems like Cuomo isn’t trying to trick anyone with his use of AI video in this instance. But it’s still an interesting choice in the current environment. Countless cultural commentators have written about how AI has emerged as the aesthetic of Trumpism and the far-right. But that might make sense, given the allies Cuomo has assembled. Trump has clearly shown a preference for Cuomo over Mamdani.
The New York mayoral election is Nov. 4, 2025.
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