AI experimentation is high risk, high reward for low-profile political campaigns
AP reported that a PAC opposing Shreveport mayor Adrian Perkins used an AI-generated attack ad that put his face on a chastened student in a principal's office. The case is a clean example of vivid, emotionally loaded presentation doing persuasive work that policy argument still had to do for itself. The fallacy here is Appeal to fear: someone tries to secure agreement mainly by amplifying danger, threat, or panic rather than by showing that the conclusion is supported. That matters here because fear can be rational when the threat is real and well evidenced. That is the exact slip in this case: fear does the persuasive work that evidence and reasoning have not done.
Associated Press · 2024-06-17
Noncitizen voting, already illegal in federal elections, becomes a centerpiece of 2024 GOP messaging
AP's May 18, 2024 overview of noncitizen-voting rhetoric documented how a politically useful intuition about election fraud kept being treated as if it were established by the evidence. The report is especially useful for seeing how tiny counts, suggestive language, and moral urgency can be stretched into system-wide claims. The fallacy here is Appeal to fear: someone tries to secure agreement mainly by amplifying danger, threat, or panic rather than by showing that the conclusion is supported. That matters here because fear can be rational when the threat is real and well evidenced. That is the exact slip in this case: fear does the persuasive work that evidence and reasoning have not done.
Associated Press · 2024-05-18
Q&A on H5N1 Bird Flu
FactCheck.org's May 2024 H5N1 explainer is a strong illustration of why people need mechanisms, prevalence, and scope before drawing practical conclusions from a scary headline. It helps distinguish real uncertainty from reasoning that jumps too fast from fragments of evidence to a preferred story. The fallacy here is Appeal to fear: someone tries to secure agreement mainly by amplifying danger, threat, or panic rather than by showing that the conclusion is supported. That matters here because fear can be rational when the threat is real and well evidenced. That is the exact slip in this case: fear does the persuasive work that evidence and reasoning have not done.
FactCheck.org · 2024-05-04
Top Haitian official denounces false claim, repeated by Trump, that immigrants are eating pets
AP's September 26, 2024 report on Haiti's transitional council president condemning the Springfield pet-eating rumor shows how quickly a sensational falsehood can travel from fringe posts to a presidential debate to the United Nations. The case is vivid enough to illustrate both emotional manipulation and the costs of repeating an unverified claim because it 'sounds like what the other side would do.' The fallacy here is Appeal to fear: someone tries to secure agreement mainly by amplifying danger, threat, or panic rather than by showing that the conclusion is supported. That matters here because fear can be rational when the threat is real and well evidenced. That is the exact slip in this case: fear does the persuasive work that evidence and reasoning have not done.
Associated Press · 2024-09-26
FACT FOCUS: Here's a look at some of the false claims made during Biden and Trump's first debate
AP's June 27, 2024 fact check of the first Biden-Trump debate is a dense collection of real argumentative shortcuts: statistics pulled loose from context, emotionally loaded immigration claims, and repeated assertions that did more rhetorical than evidential work. It is one of the best single-source stress tests in the library. The fallacy here is Appeal to fear: someone tries to secure agreement mainly by amplifying danger, threat, or panic rather than by showing that the conclusion is supported. That matters here because fear can be rational when the threat is real and well evidenced. That is the exact slip in this case: fear does the persuasive work that evidence and reasoning have not done.
Associated Press · 2024-06-27
