The Origins of Spencer Pratt’s Satirical AI Style

It is the cheerfulness of the AI memes for the Spencer Pratt mayoral campaign that signifies a cultural and technological advance. These clips restore the satirical power that political cartoonists in newspapers and print magazines lost during the digital era. No matter one’s position on the Los Angeles mayoral race, the Pratt spots harness physical movement and mimesis for the liveliest examples of cinema so far this year.

Updating the history of satirical political graphics — William Hogarth’s 18th-century engravings on British moral topics, Honoré Daumier’s caricatures of 19th-century French decadence, and Thomas Nast’s critiques of Tammany Hall corruption during America’s Gilded Age — the Pratt graphics respond to current social circumstances using AI style that’s distinctly of its time.

The spots are shocking because they dare to use Pratt’s recognizable appearance alongside ultra-realistic likenesses of his opponents, primarily presiding Mayor Karen Bass, with her perpetual “what-me-worry?” grin. Humorous antagonism heightens the emotional impact of these imaginary confrontations. They would be cartoonish, but background images of Los Angeles burnt to cinders and crumbling social order trip an alarm. It captures the desperation of the moment. Pratt’s tech team accesses that gleefully morbid fascination of 1970s disaster movies — The Poseidon Adventure, The Towering Inferno, Earthquake, and the Airport franchise — in which the desire to see Los Angeles/Hollywood “get it” (as ’70s wags quipped) is now a reality.

AI algorithms contrast models of Pratt against Bass and the Democrat pols (Gavin Newsom, Kamala Harris, Nancy Pelosi) who rule California as a one-party state, seen cavorting ghoulishly through their policy-created Garden of Earthly Delights.

The spectacle owes to Charles B. Curran, who founded Menace Studio in Los Angeles, focusing creativity on pioneering synthetic/AI imagery and video. Curran reportedly uses tools such as ByteDance’s Seedance to generate public domain images combined with short-form storytelling and structure. Some political sympathy is obvious (while Pratt’s “conservatism” is not), but it seems that Pratt frequently reposts the spots, as a savvy Madison Avenue client would.

The spots feature candidate Pratt at his advantage. A former “reality” star of MTV’s The Hills, he’s comfortable before cameras, projecting ease and humor while the videos do the work of amplifying his message: He’s a native Californian stepping up to salvage the ruin of what once was his privilege but now is every aggrieved, destitute citizen’s right. The best of the clips features a jingle that parodies “California Love” (1997) — the greatest rap song to emerge from the West Coast — where Dr. Dre, Tupac, and Roger Troutman sing out the scandalous virtues of their stomping ground. Given post-Palisades reality, the rap tune is no longer ironic; its superb, irresistible rhythm creates an anthem preserving the nativist black, white, Latino, Asian honor that far-left politicians have sacrificed to the green movement, illegal immigration, progressive cultural insanity, and fraud.

This isn’t merely Pratt’s rhetorical position on life in contemporary Los Angeles — its urban decline and especially its devastation after the 2025 Palisades Fire in which Pratt and more than 6,000 others (600 in Malibu alone) lost their homes in the conflagration (blamed on Mayor Bass’s negligence). It makes Pratt’s argument cinematic and credible.

Thanks to the multiplicity of viral broadcasts, other Pratt-centered memes follow similar jokey patterns to extend his message. They are unique for the emphasis on pop culture borrowings. It’s often noted that the left doesn’t know how to meme, and Pratt’s spots prove exceptional for capturing the lingo and sentiments of pop music and TV shows (a recent clip parodies Will Smith’s The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air sitcom). Perhaps the left’s desperation to hold on to power renders them incapable of communicating any message other than anger, hatred, condescension, and violence.

At one of the lowest points of the Biden administration’s misinformation campaign, Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre confused “deep fakes” with “cheap fakes,” totally underestimating the public’s awareness of AI simulation. Pratt videos confirm what technological sophistication means. Lithography in the 18th century was a new technology: Daumier’s engravings held bourgeois society up to ridicule. Hogarth’s print experience led him to lobby for the Engravers’ Copyright Act of 1735 — also known as Hogarth’s Act — the first to copyright visual work.

Opponents may try censoring Pratt’s techno reach — another far-left crackdown on free expression. But Hogarth’s depictions of “modern moral subjects” captured an intense, studied, realist portraiture that now, in an AI iteration, seems new and necessary. One outfit, DFF, produced a video that portrays Bass as the Green Goblin from Spider-Man, with Kamala dinking from a Hennessey liquor bottle and Gavin Newsom playing the Joker (alluding to the Batman films that call for a vigilante hero). Another ad combines the Mamas and the Papas’ wistful “California Dreaming” with Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire.” More recently, a meme on L.A. ladies in a yoga studio who risk sharing their support of Pratt conveys the ultimate pop experience from Michael Jackson’s song “You Are Not Alone.”

These Pratt clips disseminate the cultural and social awareness of Millennial America on the edge of disaster. There’s a special thrill to seeing one’s own awareness ratified, even in cartoon imagery, when the propagandistic mainstream refuses to acknowledge it. (One of the most cunning clips confronts the bias of Harvey Levin’s TMZ as the show attempts to discredit Pratt by including him in its guileless jest.)

The latest meme, a solemn black-and-white display of “California Pride,” chants, “They want you quiet / They want you scared,” which indicates that Pratt’s political cartoons aim at a bigger target than Bass: shaming the dishonest media itself. These synthetic cinematic ads bypass Hollywood and political consultancy (which no longer respects constraints but depends on traditional rhetorical lies). AI breaks old campaign rules and sets political cinema free.