‘‘National (and its supporters) are insouciant about the use of artifical intelligence to create attack ads.

This is not a drill: fake, AI-generated images are now appearing in political advertising. National (and its supporters) are insouciant about the use of artifical intelligence to create attack ads.

Cool, cool, cool. Fine, fine, fine. Until someone deep fakes Chris Penk shagging a goat.

Like social media, this new technology will transform politics. And, in the age of disinformation, this will not necessarily be for the good.

I get it. It’s cheap. Presumably, National is using digi-brats Topham Guerin to create the images of ram raiders storming a jewellery store, the cast of the Fast & Furious franchise, and a waxy-skinned woman staring anxiously out of the window.

These tools cut the expense of hiring models, photographers, graphic designers or even a subscription to an agency supplying stock images.

But what is the wider cost? The ability of AI to deceive people is truly terrifying.

With just a string of descriptive words and the click of a mouse, generative AI can produce fake images in only a few seconds.

The mass proliferation of synthetic media is anticipated within months, not years. Frankly, white people conjuring up images of people of colour to front their political arguments is already deeply problematic.

But soon we will almost certainly see fake images, video or audio recordings of politicians in compromising personal situations. Then watch that insouciance become howls of indignation. If the Pope can’t escape mockery, what hope for Penk?

Worse would be false statements about national security – and it’s already happened. As Russia invaded Ukraine in March 2022, a video of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy popped up on social media, instructing citizens to surrender.

The morally bankrupt can also profit from a landscape saturated with misinformation. This is

the liar’s dividend: in the same way ‘‘fake news’’ was used to dodge responsibility for real words and actions, politicians will try to escape accountability by denouncing authentic video and audio as fakes.

Policymakers can’t keep up with the rapid development of this technology. That’s despite tech leaders, like Google’s former CEO Eric Schmidt and godfather of AI Geoffrey Hinton, urging them to get on with it for the sake of democracy.

National has promised to use the technology ‘‘responsibly’’. How much faith can we put in that guarantee – given the team forgot to tell leader Christopher Luxon that AI was being used?

Even if we trust political parties to behave ethically (lol), what’s to stop third-party promoters mocking up staged photos to disrupt an election campaign?

In an ideal world, the parties should have sat down and hashed out an accord – a sort of AI protocol of mutually-assured destruction.

But the tech is here to stay.

And so the best to hope for is a mandatory labelling of all AI-generated content in political material.

On the subject of things we haven’t thought through properly, what does Te Pa¯ ti Ma¯ ori’s pledge to sit on the cross benches actually mean?

National’s ‘‘coalition of chaos’’ catcall is a tactic as old as MMP. But it does have a point.

Labour is confident that when it says cross benches, Te Pa¯ ti Ma¯ ori really means it will settle for a confidence and supply deal on the Budget and other main issues. (The Greens want a full-blown coalition.)

Their surety is rooted in the fact that in a postelection environment, the main parties still hold most of the cards. Te Pa¯ ti Ma¯ ori doesn’t want a National government – and it would be political suicide to step aside and let that happen. Chris Hipkins’ team also see Tamihere as a pragmatist.

Cool, cool, cool. Fine, fine, fine. Until you factor in the party’s co-leaders. Rawiri Waititi and Debbie Ngarewa-Packer are giant killers.

Waititi has built a parliamentary career on rejecting archaic conventions of democracy and political norms that come from the Pa¯ keha¯ world and do little for Ma¯ ori. Both he and Meka Whaitiri walked away from Labour to further their aims.

We should take him seriously when he says: ‘‘We have come too far in our fight for equality and rangatiratanga in this country to be pacified by runner-up positions.’’

Forcing a minority government to negotiate on almost every issue, for the better of Ma¯ ori, would be a bold statement. It would be a government that is never on solid ground.

You couldn’t AI-generate that kind of chaos.

Soon we will almost certainly see fake images, video or audio recordings of politicians in compromising personal situations. Then watch that insouciance become howls of indignation.