Generative AI and political simulacra: Hyperreality, consumption, and humorous relationships in users’ YouTube comments

The advent of generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies has created fast and easy tools to produce speech, text, visual, and audio content. In this paper, we explore the philosophical concepts of simulation, hyperreality, and consumption surrounding two generative AI trends. First, an AI trend where users create popular song renditions as though they are voiced by former U.S. President Joe Biden and President Donald Trump. Second, an AI trend where users create Bollywood romantic song renditions as though the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is singing to Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. We employ a qualitative content analysis to examine audience discourse within the YouTube comment sections of these two trends. Results indicate that the audience actively critiqued the singing voices of the leaders, even with the knowledge of it being AI generated. Moreover, by engaging in the hyperreal, they utilized their critiques to both enhance their preferred political candidate and ‘relation-ship’ the leaders with each other. Here, ‘relation-shipping’ refers to a fandom practice of constructing imagined relational narratives between public figures. The audience were also found to engage with the content as though it was created by AI rather than a human using generative AI tools. Overall, audience consumption of the trends incorporated hyperreal scenarios (relation-shipping political leaders), superficial consumption, and facetiousness towards AI.