A bit before 10 pm on Aug. 30, an X user going by @Slatzim posted a bizarre screenshot on their account. The image showed a campaign ad by Winnipeg mayoral candidate and realtor Umar Hayat, who boasted that, if elected, he would “support making sex legal for the disabled.”
“I support dignity, choice and equality. Adults with disabilities deserve the same rights, respect and opportunities as everyone else, including the right to intimacy and companionship,” read the ad, which appeared to rely heavily on AI.
It continued by listing Hayat’s promises, including advocating for federal law reform and funding, zoning and licensing changes and “bringing people together … to create solutions that protect rights, promote dignity and keep people safe.”
The ad is nonsensical: sex is legal for disabled people in Canada, as it is for anyone of legal age who consents. In a Tuesday interview with Canada’s National Observer, Hayat said he made the post in response to an email he received that asked him to advocate making sex legal for disabled people, and that he didn’t know at the time it already was legal and the request was “a joke.”
The X user, @Slatzim — who describes themselves as “a powerhouse of bigotry,” writes for a virulently anti-trans website and has 160,000 followers — wasted no time using the ad to attack Hayat’s immigrant background.
“[T]here’s a Pakistani real estate agent running to be mayor of a major Canadian city and he’s using AI to generate his campaign ads but the AI is coming up with complete nonsense and he doesn’t seem to know that because he barely speaks English,” @Slatzim wrote.
The post went viral, raking up over 915,000 views, 1,600 retweets and over 500 comments by Thursday. The comments were ruthlessly racist, attacking Hayat because of his background, such as one X user who commented that “there should be a 50 year moratorium on immigrants getting the vote, or holding public office.”
‘No simple solution’
The original post, and the response to it, is an extreme example that highlights the growing challenges that AI poses to municipal elections across the country, researchers say.
“There’s no simple solution here,” said Heidi Tworek, an expert in digital democracy and professor at the University of British Columbia.
In some cases, such as translating text or tweaking designs, AI can be a useful and relatively harmless tool for political candidates. But the technology is equally capable of creating a crisis of authenticity that “really puts a greater burden on citizens and voters,” she said.
The challenges include deepfake videos or audio being weaponized to attack candidates, or candidates dodging responsibility for things they did, in fact, say or do by claiming those things were AI-generated. The technology also makes it far harder for people to verify which information is true or not and what can accurately be attributed to candidates.
Many of these problems have existed for decades, with people using tools such as Photoshop to alter information for political gain. But the rise of AI has”accelerated” those problems and made it a lot cheaper for people to generate vast amounts of media — trustworthy or not, Tworek said.
Canada currently lacks a national framework for AI use in political campaigns, and while more regulation is needed, she warned that figuring out how to craft those rules will require navigating a suite of difficult questions.
There is precedent for such rules, with jurisdictions in Europe moving toward requiring watermarks on AI-generated content and Canada’s AI strategy and online harm laws aiming to regulate some aspects of the technology, but more issues remain, she said.
‘AI is an economical tool’
Hayat was forthcoming that he used AI to generate his campaign materials (they’re marked as such on his social media accounts) — and that he did so because it’s cheap.
Winnipeg limits individual donations to mayoral campaigns to $1,500, including the one donation candidates can make to their own campaigns. But because he didn’t receive many donations aside from his own, Hayat said his campaign budget was effectively limited to $1,500.
“I try to raise the money, [sic], but I don’t know why: people don’t trust me,” he said in an interview. “I haven’t raised the funds to promote my campaign [and] AI is an economical tool.”
He said he only uses the technology to generate campaign ads because he can’t afford a graphic designer, and that he also relies heavily on videos to spread his platform, which he said is focused on issues such as reducing crime, free transit and drawing more investment to the city.
But while cheap, he said Canadians’ broader concerns about AI mean using the technology is harming his campaign.
“When I go talk to [young people], they openly say they’re not gonna vote for me because I’m using AI,” he said. He said many people between 18 and about 40 are turned off by his use of AI because of the threat they perceive the technology poses to their jobs, he said.
Still, his use of the technology isn’t the only major hurdle his campaign faces. The disabled sex ad cost him what support he had among the city’s immigrant communities because it was so forthcoming about sex, he said.
“After this post, I don’t think I’m going to get 10 votes, or five votes even [sic],” he said.
September 14th 2026
