You may have seen Matt Damon as Odysseus in Christopher Nolan’s near-three-hour epic this summer. But what about the one starring Michigan’s Democratic nominee for Senate?

In this bizarre interpretation of the famous tale, a Trojan horse is dragged across a bridge, adorned with a banner which reads: “Definitely not communism.”

Inside, Michigan’s Abdul El-Sayed is dressed in full Trojan military garb and, laughing conspiratorially, tells his fellow democratic socialists Zohran Mamdani, Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: “They’ll never see us coming. They really think we’re just Democrats.”The video was posted in August by Mr El-Sayed’s opponent, Mike Rogers, the Trump-backed Republican candidate for Michigan’s hotly contested Senate seat. His campaign has warned of the Democrat’s supposed “extremist positions”.

“He made me Odysseus,” Mr El-Sayed said when asked about the ad. “Like, literally the hero of The Odyssey. I’ll take it.”It is just one example of a slew of so-called “AI slop” political ads that have flooded the screens of voters across the US ahead of the midterm elections on Tuesday. Spending on these ads has ballooned, with the coming polls marking the first major US elections in which generative AI technology has been ubiquitous.

A report published earlier this month by the Wesleyan Media Project (WMP), which tracks election ad spending, found that $137m (£103m) has been spent on AI-generated adverts this year alone, up from just $50,000 during the 2024 presidential election year.

Another AI ad targeting Dr El-Sayed, paid for by a group aligned with Ted Cruz, a Texan Republican senator, depicted a mock sitcom called Family Values.

“The destruction of Israel and the West isn’t just a game for them – it’s a mission,” a narrator says over jaunty music and a montage of Dr El-Sayed laughing and playing board games with family members and the controversial Left-wing streamer Hasan Piker, who campaigned alongside the Democrat.

The advert attempts to tie Dr El-Sayed’s family to the Islamist group the Muslim Brotherhood, a claim which became a flashpoint as the campaign reached fever pitch in recent weeks. Donald Trump last week called him a “jihadist” who was “on the side of the terrorists”. Dr El-Sayed has repeatedly denied any family ties to the Muslim Brotherhood.

“El-Sayed isn’t playing games, and his family values are wrong for Michigan,” the narrator says as the advert ends with an AI-generated image showing the Democrat candidate posing alongside our women in niqabs and Mr Piker, who has apologised for saying America “deserved 9/11”.

Dr El-Sayed isn’t the only one who has been targeted. Josh Shapiro, the Democratic governor of Pennsylvania, hit out on Monday after his rival shared an AI-generated clip showing him grinning while listing unflattering headlines during his incumbency.

The advert, made for Republican Stacy Garrity’s campaign for governor, featured a digitally created Mr Shapiro claiming to the camera that he had “given you some of the highest taxes in America” and supported “abortion right up to a baby’s first breath”.

A spokesman for Mr Shapiro told The Telegraph the advert was “cheap, dishonest AI bull----” pushed out by Mr Trump’s pick for Pennsylvania governor in the “closing days of her disastrous, flailing campaign”.

Elsewhere, James Talarico, the Democratic candidate in Texas for the Senate, is locked in a remarkably tight race against Ken Paxton, the state’s attorney general. Texas has not elected a Democrat to the US Senate since the 1980s, yet polls currently place the two candidates neck-and-neck.

Mr Talarico has been the target of a series of AI attack adverts over the past few months, which have focused largely on his past comments on gender issues.

In September, the Ken Paxton for Senate campaign shared an advert showing an AI-generated Mr Talarico rewriting the Bible with a crayon. His annotations included lines such as “in the beginning, God was non-binary”, and “God said let there be six genders, and there were”.

In response, Mr Talarico put out an advert of his own accusing Mr Paxton of “corruption”, which closed with text stating: “Made by humans, not AI”.

Another AI-generated advert shared by Citizens for Sanity, a pro-Trump campaign group, featured Mr Talarico dressed as Maria Von Trapp from The Sound of Music.

Although some have called for stricter regulations on the use of AI in political ads, the US has largely shied away from regulations that might limit freedom of speech.

During his second term, the US president has repeatedly shared controversial AI-generated content, such as a racist video which depicted the Obamas as apes and another earlier this month in which he chased and played with the tiger which killed a British man who entered an enclosure at Yorkshire Wildlife Park.

Critics have claimed that some of the adverts have veered away from political campaigning and into deepfake territory, in which AI is used to manipulate real audio or video, making people appear to have said or done things they never actually did.

Rebecca Cooke, the Democratic candidate for a congressional race in Wisconsin, sent a cease and desist letter to her opponent in September claiming that a video he posted was a deepfake.

Derrick Van Orden, a Republican representative in Wisconsin, used Grok Imagine to make Ms Cooke say that she wanted to “take advantage of as much corruption as possible and give every illegal alien free healthcare”.

Derrick Van Orden, a Republican congressional candidate in Wisconsin, was accused of using AI to make a deepfake video of his opponent Her lawyers claimed that Mr Van Orden had used AI for “deepfake imagery to give the veneer of truth to these falsities, for the purpose of harming Ms Cooke and her reputation”.

Mr Van Orden responded to her legal letter by sharing an AI-generated video of a duck saying “cease and desist!” while wearing a Democratic Socialists of America T-shirt.

Campaign groups including the American Association of Political Consultants are calling for federal regulations labelling “deceptive” AI content to override the current jumble of state restrictions.

Roughly 30 US states have so far passed legislation restricting the use of AI to generate political adverts, or forcing its disclosure.

Meanwhile, three states have limited deepfakes targeting political candidates intended to influence elections. Maryland has banned election-related deepfakes altogether, while Texas and Minnesota have outlawed them within 30 and 90 days of voting respectively.

Free speech advocates argue that AI simply creates a new tool for political satire – akin to traditional cartoons and caricatures.

Many of the adverts targeting midterm candidates have focused on culture war issues, and included jokes and upbeat songs that some could argue is satire.

An AI country song aired on Maine radio calling Troy Jackson, the Democratic candidate for this state, a “freak” and a “creep” because “he has two kids with his cousin”.

Among the lyrics in the jingle: are “If he’ll f--- his own family, he’ll f--- yours too.”Susan Collins, Maine’s Republican senator, distanced herself from one advert funded by the Senate Leadership Fund, a fundraising committee aligned with Senate Republicans, and called for it to be removed.

Susan Collins, Maine’s Republican senator, called on her own party funders to remove an advert Concerns have not only been raised about how political rivals might use AI to attack each other but also how the technology is employed by overseas powers to sow disinformation.

The US national intelligence office warned that foreign adversaries were using AI to spread disinformation ahead of the midterms, and Russia was the most active in attempts to undermine the election, The Washington Post reported.

Researchers have attributed the posts to Operation Matryoshka, named after Russian nesting dolls. The Russian state-backed operation swamps social media with clips that appear to be from established media outlets to spread disinformation.

As the technology has become more accessible and easier to use, the US midterms have become a testing ground for whether voters will be moved by AI-generated ads.

Michael Franz, co-director of the WMP, said that traditional political campaign adverts were as “boring as they come”.

“If you can enhance that message with some satire, with some goof, you’re creating something sharper which could make political ads more effective,” he added.