Brazil’s top elections court is expected on Tuesday to set new limits on AI-generated and altered campaign content, Reuters reported, weeks before the October 4 first-round vote. The Superior Electoral Court, the TSE, is trying to clarify what counts as a deepfake as generated clips fill social feeds and popular chatbots keep ranking candidates despite a ban.
The Tuesday case involves Senator Flavio Bolsonaro, the right’s leading presidential candidate. His party’s convention in July used an AI avatar of his father, former President Jair Bolsonaro, who is under house arrest and barred from addressing the public, Reuters said. That appearance quickly drew legal challenges.
The TSE already requires labels on AI-generated campaign material. It also bans deepfakes, bars generative systems such as ChatGPT from recommending or ranking candidates even when a user asks, and imposes a blackout on publishing or paying to promote new AI-generated content immediately before and after voting. Tuesday’s ruling is expected to define deepfake more clearly.
Not all of the content is a fake event. Reuters described labeled posts from both the Bolsonaro and Lula camps, including campaign songs and cartoonish clips. What worries the court more are videos that show things that never happened. In early August, TSE Justice Andre Mendonca ordered the removal of a video placing Bolsonaro with former banker Daniel Vorcaro in scenes that did not occur. The court logged 19 AI-related cases in the first 11 days of the campaign.
Chatbots are the other leak. A May survey by Projeto Brief found nearly 63 percent of voters were willing to ask AI tools about candidates, Reuters reported. An ITS Rio study found that seven of the most used chatbots in Brazil ranked or ordered candidates in 90 percent of their answers. Joao Victor Archegas, legal coordinator at ITS Rio, told Reuters: “It is not the tool itself that is the problem. It is its potential use in certain contexts that may lead to dangerous outcomes for our democracy.”
The court can label a dancing-doll ad. A private chatbot that still ranks the field is harder to take down.
Sources
https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/brazil-races-rein-ai-weeks-before-election-2026-09-01/