Botification: How AI is (and isn’t) used by Centre County politicians & 2026 campaigns
Something seemed a little off about Michelle Schellberg’s campaign portrait.
The Republican state House candidate’s long silver earrings appeared mismatched and swallowed by her hair. She had bangs, which she had not been photographed with in recent years. The stars on the American flag behind her were spaced inconsistently.
It appears Schellberg, who is challenging 10-term state Rep. Scott Conklin for his western Centre County seat, is using an artificial intelligence-generated — or at least heavily AI-altered — portrait of herself on her campaign website. Another was used to advertise a speaking engagement and a third was submitted in a League of Women Voters candidate questionnaire to the Centre Daily Times (she replaced it when asked to).
While it is among the more overt uses of AI in Centre County electoral politics, it is certainly not the first.
“I’m a one-man show pretty much,” said Democrat John Zangari, who is taking on Republican state Rep. Kerry Benninghoff in Centre County’s eastern half. He added later, “I’d love a policy person on my team. On a campaign level this small, we can’t have it.”
So Zangari uses Perplexity AI to help sift through bills in Harrisburg and find other policy sources online. Perplexity is more of a jumping-off point for deeper research, he noted, and he acknowledged AI’s tendency to fabricate information outright.
Zangari said his duck logo, Puddles, was originally AI-generated, alongside a cartoon likeness of himself he used in some materials. But he scrapped both and drew up a new Puddles in Adobe Illustrator, based in part on the AI Puddles.
The Schellberg photos
Where Zangari used AI for tertiary elements of his campaign materials, Schellberg, who chairs the county GOP, appears to be supplementing her actual likeness with one altered by AI.
The portrait on her site, in which her likeness dons a plain red top, more closely resembles Schellberg’s appearance in photos from her son’s 2022 wedding than more recent photos. One of the wedding photos is on Schellberg’s site.
Besides the subtler AI artifacts, the “SCHELLBERG FOR PA” text underneath the portrait strongly resembles the AI-generated text found on the county’s emergency communications Facebook page, or that of a local fire department. After conducting an analysis, Siwei Lyu, director of the University at Buffalo’s Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Data Science, said the image of Schellberg appeared GPT-generated.
Schellberg submitted a similar portrait to the League of Women Voters for use in a voting guide, published by the CDT on Sunday, but replaced it at the request of the publication’s editor before it went live. Schellberg did not respond to requests for comment.
Lyu’s analysis also said with near certainty a generic photo of a small town on Schellberg’s website appears to be GPT-generated, one giveaway being a mangled American flag. The site itself is from a company that advertises its services as “Vibe Code Apps & Websites with AI, Fast.”
Penn State’s Turning Point USA chapter used an AI-generated portrait of Schellberg to advertise an event with her. The likeness is similar to how Schellberg appeared at a 2024 Trump rally. A photo of another guest, fellow Republican state House candidate Kirsten McTernan, was not AI-generated.
It is unclear whether Schellberg or Turning Point generated the image, or why an AI image was used. At least one other candidate for state House generated a portrait of herself to save money, Spotlight PA reported last month.
Turning Point’s president, Darrius Singh, did not respond to requests for comment.
“What we know about women candidates is that they’ve long been scrutinized for their appearance, way more than male candidates have,” said Jean Sinzdak, associate director of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University.
Female candidates, Sinzdak said, experience a lot of pressure to “try to fit into a mold of what, at least, they perceive voters want from them,” primarily seniority and gravitas. The Schellberg portraits fit that mold, she said.
Sundar Shyam, co-director of the Media Effects Research Laboratory at Penn State, wrote in an email, “Unless AI is used to make up a blatant lie or distort reality in extreme ways, there is no expectation of full disclosure of its use.”
“We as a community do not have problems with a political candidate applying make-up on their faces, so the technological equivalent of it (touching up a headshot of oneself) should not be an issue,” he wrote. “But, if a candidate uses AI to portray themselves in a way that leads to wrong conclusions about who they are, especially when it comes to their stated values or platform positions, then that would be inappropriate, if not unethical.”
Politics hasn’t fully embraced AI
AI-generated media is becoming increasingly common in the political world, and there is little regulation statewide or nationally.
President Donald Trump is a prolific AI user, last week posting an AI-generated image of himself as Jesus Christ before deleting it amid outrage. Democratic Govs. Kathy Hochul of New York and Gavin Newsom of California have also posted absurd, AI-generated images of themselves to mock Trump. A U.S. House campaign in Philadelphia admitted last week to using Claude to generate responses for a candidate questionnaire.
But Trump Jesus and Hochul Rambo appear to be edge cases. Locally, most campaigns seem to be keeping more obvious AI use at arm’s length.
“We don’t touch anything like that,” said Laura Shadle, a top Conklin aide. She said the campaign believes voters “deserve authentic communication in any format from us,” so it doesn’t use AI at all.
Benninghoff said he takes pride in writing his own material and doesn’t use AI-generated photos.
“Me? You get what you get,” he said. “Obviously, I have a lot less hair than I used to, and that’s what you’re going to get at the end of the day.”
State Rep. Paul Takac, a Democrat whose district is sandwiched between Conklin’s and Benninghoff’s, said his campaign might use AI to edit text or make minor edits to photos, such as by removing a bird from the background. Any AI edits would be reviewed by humans, he said, and the campaign has no plans to generate images “from the ground up.”
Neither Benninghoff nor Shadle particularly took issue with Schellberg’s apparent use of AI. Shadle said it appeared harmless, but “you don’t want to leave any room for doubt or concern of any kind of deception, and there is an element of that there.”
Benninghoff voiced less concern with using AI to edit images and more with blindly using it for information gathering.
“I think every candidate needs to do what they’re comfortable with,” he said.
Takac said AI shouldn’t be used to misrepresent reality, but wouldn’t draw a red line anywhere specifically.
“I guess I just don’t have the language to critique AI images or text,” he said. “It’s a new frontier.”
Local campaigns did not report AI subscriptions in their annual financial reports, though Takac pays for Canva. The company offers a suite of AI tools, but if Takac’s team is using them on his social media accounts, it isn’t obvious.
McTernan, his opponent, did not return a voicemail seeking comment. McTernan has not filed a campaign finance report yet, nor does her campaign have a public web presence.
At the national level, the Democratic National Committee has banned staffers from using AI for all purposes but coding, Axios reported last week, while the GOP is using it to scrape social media and conduct phone outreach.
