Spencer Pratt wants to be mayor. His fans want him to be Batman.

When former reality TV star Spencer Pratt recently reposted the video on Xit went viral so quickly that few people seemed to stop to really ask themselves what exactly they were looking at. Jeb Bush called it “perhaps the best political ad of the year.” Former Republican congressman Matt Gaetz called it “basically a maximalist expression of what political advertising can do.”

Understandably, they thought it was an advertising campaign. Spencer Pratt, a registered Republican, is running for mayor of Los Angeles, and the video echoed his dark-horse campaign themes: Los Angeles was screwed by its inept and disgraceful leadership, and he’s the one to fix it. But by normal definition it wasn’t advertising at all. It was something totally weird: an AI-generated fan video by Los Angeles-based filmmaker Charlie Curran, whose other recent works include a video with the Pope rapper Chief Keef dances with a drill and one of the Rizzlers flying over Iran.

The video Pratt posted depicted Los Angeles as Batman’s Gotham. Karen Bass, the Democratic incumbent mayor and one of Pratt’s opponents in the upcoming nonpartisan primary, is the villainous Joker. As things progress, a man who looks a lot like Joe Rogan, if Joe Rogan is dressed as Commissioner Gordon, lights a searchlight that lands in a cloudy sky with a sign that reads “SP”. At that signal, Pratt dons his black armor, cape and gloves—much like Batman’s—and descends to save a post-apocalyptic Los Angeles from its democratic captors.

Making a video like this in the past would have required actors who look like the politicians in question, sets, sound effects, costumes, Joe Rogan, extras, make-up artists, cameras and the people who operate them, permits, writers, editors, security and, you have to imagine, permission to use the intellectual property in question. That would cost a lot of money, which would also mean creating a political action committee and releasing all the related statements about who made the video and why. But now generative AI is here – and for better or worse, humans can do whatever they want.