A video on the Facebook page of Daniel Wong’s campaign showed Black Texans thanking him for helping them find work, buy food and keep the lights on. None of them were real. The clip was generated by artificial intelligence, and it came down after criticism, days before Fort Bend County votes on Tuesday.
Wong, a Republican, has been interim Fort Bend County judge, the top elected official of the Houston-area county, since April. He is running for a full four-year term against Democratic County Commissioner Dexter McCoy. The people in the clip were presented as ordinary Black residents vouching for him. Reporters who watched it found warped buildings, a distorted Wong hat, misspelled text and voices that sounded alike.
McCoy said the faces were not invented from nothing. He alleged that they resembled real people who worked for the Wong campaign, and that selfies submitted at polling places were turned into AI versions of them saying things “they never consented to do.” He called it fake support aimed at Black voters.
“Stealing the faces of ordinary people to fake support from Black voters is racist, vile and flat-out wrong,” McCoy said. He answered with a video of his own, using real footage, captioned “Can you spot the AI? Nah you can’t.”
Wong’s campaign has not denied the video is AI-generated. It denied making it. “The video that has purportedly stirred ‘outrage’ among Democrats was actually created by a Democrat,” the campaign said in a statement, without naming anyone. Communications director Bobby Eberle said he had spoken to the creator. “I talked to the creator of the video today, and he told me that he received consent,” Eberle said. The campaign did not say who consented, or to what. It accused McCoy of using race to avoid talking about Wong’s record. Wong criticized McCoy for questioning the support the video depicted. The video was later removed from the campaign’s accounts.
Who made the clip, and whether any real person’s likeness was used without permission, remain unestablished. Wong’s campaign says a supporter made it; McCoy says it came from the campaign’s own circle.
The Black stake is what the video was built to say. Its subject was not policy. It was gratitude: Black residents depicted as people a county judge had rescued, in a county where the vote is days away. A fake endorsement from a group of voters is an attempt to borrow their trust without asking for it, and that is the claim McCoy makes.
Texas law makes it a crime to publish a deepfake video within 30 days of an election with the intent to injure a candidate or influence the result. Whether a flattering fake of one’s own supporters meets that standard is untested here, and no complaint or charge has been reported.
Wong took over the county’s top job after the removal of his predecessor, KP George, following a money-laundering conviction. Voters in Fort Bend County decide on Tuesday, Nov. 3 whether to keep him.
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