3 AI Tactics Reshaping Israel's Election Campaigns, WSJ Finds

Three tactics are defining how artificial intelligence is being used in Israeli election campaigns, according to reporting from The Wall Street Journal: lawmakers are hiring dedicated AI advisers, campaigns are working to influence what chatbots say about candidates, and AI-generated ads are being produced faster than regulators can review them.

The pattern described by the Journal shows a campaign apparatus adapting to generative AI tools years faster than election law has been updated to address them. That gap — not any single tactic — is the throughline of the reporting.

What AI Roles Are Israeli Campaigns Hiring For?

Israeli lawmakers are bringing on AI advisers as part of campaign staff, the Journal reports, a role that did not exist in prior election cycles. The advisers' work spans the other two tactics identified in the reporting: shaping how chatbots answer voter questions and directing the output of AI ad-generation tools. Hiring a specialist for this function signals that campaigns now treat AI output — not just traditional media buys or field organizing — as a channel worth staffing and managing directly.

How Are Campaigns Trying to Influence Chatbot Answers?

A second tactic the Journal describes is campaigns working to influence what AI chatbots return when voters ask about candidates or issues. As more voters turn to conversational AI tools for quick answers instead of search engines or news sites, a chatbot's summary of a candidate's record or positions can function like an unpaid, unregulated campaign statement. Campaigns attempting to shape those answers are effectively treating chatbot outputs as a new kind of earned media — one with no equivalent in existing disclosure or fairness rules built for television and print.

Why Are AI-Generated Ads Outpacing Regulators?

The third tactic is production speed. Campaigns are churning out AI-generated ads faster than regulators can keep up, according to the Journal's reporting. Traditional ad review — checking claims, flagging manipulated imagery, verifying disclosure — was built around a production cycle measured in days. Generative tools compress that cycle to hours, letting a campaign test, discard, and redeploy dozens of ad variants before a regulator or opposing campaign has reviewed the first one. The result described in the reporting is a volume mismatch: oversight bodies built for a slower media cycle facing a much faster one.

What Tools Are Behind These Campaign Tactics?

The Journal's reporting does not name specific AI vendors used by the campaigns it describes, but the underlying technology categories are consistent with tools already in wide commercial use: large language models for chatbot responses, generative image and video tools for ad creative, and increasingly, voice-synthesis tools for narrated ad spots. Voice-cloning platforms such as ElevenLabs have become a standard part of the AI ad-production toolkit industry-wide, illustrating why campaigns can now produce narrated video ads without hiring a voice actor or studio — one more reason production has outpaced review capacity.

What Happens Next in Israel's Election AI Fight?

Based on the tactics the Journal identifies, several open questions will determine how this plays out before Israel's next national election:

• Whether Israeli election regulators introduce faster-turnaround review processes or disclosure requirements specific to AI-generated ads
• Whether chatbot operators publish policies on political-content accuracy or add sourcing/citations to reduce campaign influence over their answers
• Whether opposing campaigns respond by hiring their own AI advisers, turning the practice into a standard campaign line item rather than an edge case
• Whether any ad or chatbot dispute becomes a legal test case that forces regulators to act faster than the Journal's reporting suggests they currently can

Key Terms in This Story

AI adviser — a campaign staff role focused on managing a candidate's AI-related output, from chatbot responses to ad generation.

Chatbot influence — efforts by outside parties to shape the answers a conversational AI tool gives about a candidate or issue, similar in effect to search-engine optimization but without equivalent disclosure norms.

AI-generated ad — a political advertisement created wholly or partly using generative AI tools for image, video, or voice content, often produced at a volume and speed regulators are not built to review.

Regulatory lag — the gap between the pace of AI-driven campaign production and the pace at which election oversight bodies can review or respond to that content.

The Journal's account frames the Israeli case as an early, concrete example of a dynamic election officials in other countries are also beginning to confront: campaign technology moving faster than the rules meant to govern it.

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