By Kevin T. Dugan and Caitlin Ostroff

When Greg Abbott made an AI-generated video warning what a Zohran Mamdani mayoralty would look like in New York, he was surprised at how quickly it spread online.

The three-minute video, which went live last month, showed Mamdani dancing while the city burned. The Wall Street bull got demolished by a rocket. All this was set to a modified version of Frank Sinatra's signature song. "Imagine North Korea with a dash of Shariah," a fake Sinatra sings. "That's what you got, New York, New York."

Abbott isn't a political operative, at least not in the traditional sense. Instead, he's a semiretired entrepreneur who lives in Florida, near Mar-a-Lago, and has a hobby of writing parody songs.

"I care about the city, and I care about crime," Abbott said of his video. The 75-year-old formerly ran a pantyhose and underwear company, and later a food distribution service. He left New York City years ago, but still has family in Manhattan, including his son, a rapper called "Infamous Billa."

Abbott has had his own dealings with the law. He was swept up in the 2019 "Varsity Blues" college bribery scandal and served about a month in prison. According to the Justice Department, Abbott and his wife paid a sham charity $125,000 to fake college admissions exams for his daughter.

While AI-generated videos are a years-old phenomena, cheap and easily accessible models are now more sophisticated than ever. This has enabled an overwhelming stream of innocuous cat soap operas, but the technology can just as easily be used to make embarrassing videos of political opponents. President Trump posts them regularly on his social-media pages.

Andrew Cuomo, Mamdani's main challenger, briefly posted an anti-Mamdani deepfake video last week -- one with similar themes to Abbott's -- before taking it down and attributing it to an error by a junior staffer. Then Thursday, the Cuomo campaign shared a second AI-generated video, depicting a deepfaked Mamdani in a mock episode of the old animated series Schoolhouse Rock. It suggests he doesn't know what a legislative bill is and criticizes his record as a state lawmaker.

A spokesman for Cuomo said the video was a parody.

A spokeswoman for the Mamdani campaign criticized the spread of AI-generated videos in politics, saying they traffic in misinformation.

The sudden rise of Mamdani, a 34-year-old Democratic socialist who has served as a state assemblyman, has brought to the fore debates over class, race and even the value of capitalism, drawing national attention.

Abbott wanted to weigh in. He had occasionally written parody songs for fun, and thought he would try one set to the Sinatra classic. He found an under-the-radar AI studio to set the words to music and jarring images, some of which he handpicked. The cost: less than $5,000, he said.

The finished product, titled "Commietown," used racially inflammatory images, including those of threatening Arab men, some toting guns, and a Black man chasing people on a subway platform with a machete.

Abbott posted it on Sept. 26 to Instagram, where he has about 100 followers. It has since been viewed hundreds of thousands of times after being shared by a Newsmax writer and conservative rocker Ted Nugent, among others.

Abbott declined to identify the digital creators who made the video or the AI programs they used. He did say that he wouldn't have been able to afford making such a video before the advent of AI and insisted that he didn't intend to trick anyone.

"There's a danger where you misrepresent the truth," he said. "Everyone knows when it's a satire."

While AI can yield realistic videos cheaply, they also have the potential to backfire, causing voters to question other information shared by a candidate.

"When voters assume that everything is fake, there will be an even higher premium on authenticity for political candidates," said Stephen Smith, a partner at communications firm Purple Strategies.

While major AI-video platforms such as OpenAI's Sora have put limits on using the likeness of prominent figures such as politicians, smaller platforms still allow that activity.

The technology exists in a legally gray area, but existing copyright and trademark laws could rein in those making and sharing videos that use celebrities' likeness, brands or other protected works, intellectual-property lawyers say.

Robert Finkelstein, co-chairman of Frank Sinatra Enterprises, which manages the likeness rights of Frank Sinatra, said that the creator of the video wasn't licensed to use the singer's music and likeness and that there are copyright issues with the use of "New York, New York."

Abbott said he thought he wasn't violating any copyright because the lyrics were his own.

After The Wall Street Journal reached out to Frank Sinatra Enterprises for comment and shared a link to the video, YouTube took down the video, citing a copyright claim by the estate. The video remains on other platforms.

Abbott has since uploaded a new version of the video, replacing the images of Sinatra singing with himself.

Write to Kevin T. Dugan at kevin.dugan@wsj.com and Caitlin Ostroff at caitlin.ostroff@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

October 31, 2025 12:01 ET (16:01 GMT)

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