Former New York City Council Candidate Jonathan Rinaldi Allegedly Used AI to Create False Endorsements and Fabricated News Reports

January 17, 2025

Queens prosecutors allege that former City Council candidate Jonathan Rinaldi used AI to create fake endorsements and news reports during his 2025 campaign. The allegations include attributing support from public figures and institutions, as well as falsely claiming an opponent's withdrawal. Rinaldi faces forgery and possession of forged instruments charges.

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Alleged deployer

political-candidates, political-campaigns, jonathan-rinaldi

Alleged developer

synthetic-video-generation-technology-developers, openai, image-generation-technology-developers, google, face-swapping-technology-developers, deepfake-technology-developers

Alleged harmed parties

voters-in-new-york-city-council-district-29, voters-in-new-york, voters, the-amsterdam-news, social-media-users, robert-holden, queens-jewish-alliance, public-institutions, political-candidates, police-departments, people-falsely-attributed-as-authors, p.s.-101-school-in-queens, organizations-falsely-represented-as-political-endorsers, nonprofit-organizations, news-organizations, new-york-post, new-york-daily-news, new-york-city-police-department-112th-precinct, new-york-city-police-department, lynn-schulman, instagram-users, facebook-users, epistemic-integrity, elected-officials, educational-communities, democratic-integrity, daniel-kurzyna, cnn, asian-wave-alliance

AI governance case studies

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Data source

Incident data is from the AI Incident Database (AIID).

When citing the database as a whole, please use:

McGregor, S. (2021) Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-21). Virtual Conference.

Pre-print on arXiv · Database snapshots & citation guide

We use weekly snapshots of the AIID for stable reference. For the official suggested citation of a specific incident, use the “Cite this incident” link on each incident page.