Political actors are using AI video models, large language models, and account automation tools to create entirely-generated personas with believable web presences. One of the most interesting examples we’ve seen is a pro-Trump persona called “Marwane” on a YouTube channel called MaxTVx. We took several snapshots of its journey, as the channel regularly changes tactics and visibility.
In an introduction video, Marwane explains what MaxTVx is all about:
“They told you to sit down. They told you to stay quiet. Not here. Welcome to MaxTVx. My name is Marwane, and this is the channel that breaks down what the headlines leave out. MaxTVX. Maximum television, taken to the X.”
The Introduction video states MaxTVx’s allegiance. “We stand with President Trump, we stand for the forgotten men and women this country left behind, and we’re not afraid to say it out loud.”
Marwane’s deepfake technology is state-of-the-art. It uses a diffusion-based photo-to-video model, with long video generations and very accurate lip sync. Some videos even include a shaking podcast microphone and a camera that mimics a webcam as it hunts for focus — subtle realism signals that were beyond the capabilities of character-consistent AI video models just a year ago.
MaxTVx has sharp messaging discipline. It’s very focused on the SAVE America Act, the Trump Administration’s election overhaul bill. It regularly targets Senate Majority Leader John Thune and the Senate filibuster rule as it covers the day-to-day drama around the SAVE Act’s passage.
We ran MaxTVx’s videos through an in-house claim extraction process, identifying the propositional content used to support a video’s arguments. A total of 62% of the channel’s video time is spent arguing for election overhaul.
Marwane is a unified AI persona. Its web presence bolsters its legitimacy and increases its reach. The MaxTVx website looks legitimate. It is built off of Hostinger Horizons, a AI development platform for “vibe coding” websites. The website’s copy appears to be mostly AI-generated, as is Marwane’s AI-generated headshot. The page includes a broken privacy page, and a disclaimer page that never discloses that Marwane is not real.
The website links to a Facebook account that doesn’t exist, Instagram and X accounts with almost no followers, and for some reason, a dedicated Pinterest account. There is also a Medium account with various types of blog posts, from simple YouTube video reposts to extremely long, AI-generated passages.
MaxTVx does not act alone, but it is the most notable page in its group. There are at least two YouTube channels that are directly affiliated with MaxTVx: “Beaujob73” and “CosmicGeo”. Both pages are also dedicated to the Marwane persona, and both are collaborators on some of MaxTVx’s most popular videos.
Beaujob73’s channel history showed the lineage of the Marwane persona, before they cleaned up the channel sometime on August 2nd. After posting a sloppy Rachel Maddow deepfake in April, Beaujob73 started creating Dr. Jiang deepfakes in May, using a narrative style that the Marwane persona would later adopt. Eventually, Dr. Jiang’s deepfake voice changed into the voice that Marwane’s persona would use.
The first video that featured the Marwane persona was posted by CosmicGeo on May 13th. The MaxTVx YouTube channel was created on May 11th, but it didn’t post is first video until June 13th. This is when the fully-realized Marwane persona started gaining traction.
MaxTVx has inspired other AI channels that mimick its videos with AI personas of their own. MaxTVx posted a video called: “Johnson’s $10 BILLION SAVE Act Move Just Bypassed the Filibuster — Did Democrats Just Lose”.
Within two days, three more channels followed suit:
“EagleUnionNetwork”, featuring an AI-generated, middle-aged white man with glasses in a casual environment. The AI video quality is nothing notable or new.
“FocalPointUSA”, featuring an AI news anchor, a black man with glasses, with a fairly low quality AI video.
“Duke’s Ledger”, a voice-only, Rachel Maddow deepfake channel that discusses conservative talking points.
The titles match verbatim, and the scripts are structured to hit the same points in similar orders. We analyzed their transcripts and normalized for time. Then, we extracted claims from each video to see how the content overlapped. Of the 49 factual claims made in MaxTVx’s transcript, 44 of them appeared in the two other videos of similar length, while the significantly shorter FocalPointUSA video used 37 of them.
The Duke’s Ledger video was extremely similar to MaxTVx’s, with only slight rewordings. The other two channels took more liberties, despite following the same beat.
For, let’s look how all four videos addressed the claim that “the SAVE act will survive”, all around the halfway through their videos:
The structure is fixed, but the vocabulary changes. The scripts are written by large language models, which modify the same talking points for the voice of each persona, like a giant Madlib. We don’t make an assessment about whether these channels are operated by the same actor as the MaxTVx channel. It’s equally possible these are unrelated copycats recycling the same script, or they could be part of the same operation.
Not all copycats are created equal. Another MaxTVx video called “6 Democrats Just Voted FOR Trump’s SAVE Act — Why The Wall Is Cracking” inspired an AI channel called MonicaCaldwellTV to release a video with that same title two days later.
But while the MonicaCaldwellTV video discussed the same news event, it had completely different narrative angles and almost no structural similarities. Any similarities were statistically insignificant and barely above chance.
So far, MaxTVx appears to be a trendsetter, if not the leader in a pack of pro-Trump deepfake and AI-generated channels. But it’s still a sloppy, fast-moving AI persona. On August 3rd at approximately 1:15 ET, it set all of its videos to private, except those that were collaboratively posted with Beaujob73 and CosmicGeo. The old videos from Beaujob73’s channel, including the Dr. Jiang deepfakes, were removed between August 1st and August 3rd. Meanwhile, all of the videos from CosmicGeo remain up as of the afternoon of August 3rd.
We’re watching an actor move and coordinate channels in real time, as other channels react. The website and coordinated accounts help anchor the persona as this happens, but they too could be quickly wiped and shifted over to other domains. Archiving and covering this as it happens is often difficult.
This is normal in the evolving world of AI-generated political messaging. A persona with extreme message discipline can gain millions of views in a month, inspire a collection of copycats, then disappear.
THANKS I ABSOLUTELY HATE IT
It's amazing how they say so much while saying absolutely nothing of substance. The president's spokeswoman (unnamed) said his patience was gone (no direct quote). The Senate's top Republican (unnamed) fired back a response so cold (no direct quote) that jaws dropped all over Washington. Talk about hard-hitting journalism! /s