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A group supporting the Paramount-Warner Bros. merger is using artificial intelligence to help pressure California Attorney General Rob Bonta to drop his antitrust lawsuit.
The group, which uses the neutral-sounding name
Neighbors for Strong Communities, uses AI to craft letters that are sent to Bonta’s office, but says that the senders are all real people.
“Anyone should be able to tell their story, and we use tech to make it easy for them,” said Tanner Kelly, the group’s co-founder. “Nothing we do is AI-generated. It’s AI-assisted. It’s a real person telling a story.”
The group is also planning a press conference Thursday outside the Paramount gates to raise alarms about what would happen if the studio leaves California. CEO David Ellison has threatened to leave the state if no deal is reached by Oct. 1, when the company will begin to owe a $7 million-per-day ticking fee to Warner Bros. investors.
Kelly declined to disclose the group’s donors, but denied the allegation that the group is a Paramount “astroturf” campaign — i.e., an artificial grassroots effort funded by a corporation.
“This is an independent campaign. It’s not being run by Paramount,” he said. “We have not received any direct funding from Paramount.”
Asked if he had received indirect funding from Paramount, he said he was not aware of it.
“As a general policy, we don’t disclose our donors. We comply with all reporting requirements,” he said. “We want to be able to attract donors to our [nonprofit] (c)4. Out of respect for the people who want to contribute, we don’t make it public.”
Paramount declined to comment.
Kelly is an ex-registered lobbyist who also founded Influent, a vendor that uses AI to generate personalized letters to policymakers, in lieu of old-fashioned form letters. (In a follow-up message, he noted that his lobbyist registration terminated last year.) In a LinkedIn post last year, he wrote that he was using AI to help Fortune 100 companies “mobilize real, persuasive grassroots movements at scale.”
AI-generated influence campaigns have been a controversial subject in California. In July, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a bill, AB 1736, that prohibits “lobbyist employers” from using fake comments to influence political outcomes.
Influent’s website stresses that it relies on “real people,” and argues that it empowers them “to share their stories with on-message and persuasive materials that move decision-makers to action.” The company collects five-minute surveys from individuals and then turns them into advocacy letters, which the sender must approve before it is delivered.
“Generic astroturf form letters are destined for the trash bin,” the company says on its website. “Every Influent letter, Tweet, phone call, and message is tailored to the individual — each one unique, reflecting the authentic voice of its sender.”
Neighbors for Strong Communities, which was incorporated in Washington, D.C., in June, has also worked on a campaign against data centers and for Flock Safety, the surveillance camera company. Influent’s other co-founder, Nate Saletan, is also a director of Neighbors for Strong Communities, according to its incorporation filing.
In the case of Paramount, Kelly said the group has mobilized 2,000 people, and has generated 1,000 calls to Bonta’s office. He said that AI was being used only for the letters, and not for the phone calls or other forms of outreach.
The group is recording video testimonials from entertainment workers who say they fear the job impact if Paramount leaves California. The group made several of them available for interviews with Variety in advance of the press conference.
“This is really scary,” said Ilona Roytman, a hair stylist who is involved in the campaign. “If they go away, a lot more people are going to lose their jobs.”
Avrielle Corti, an actor and voice-over artist, said she, too, has concerns about Paramount moving out of state.
“Taking Paramount out of California is like taking the Golden Gate Bridge and putting it in Nebraska,” she said.
Dani Kelly, who runs a podcast studio in Chatsworth, has also provided a testimonial for the group and has posted on her social media about it.
“L.A. was built by the studios,” she told Variety. “They are the hearts of L.A. Once they leave, there will be a ripple effect.”
Kelly, who is no relation to the group’s co-founder, said that she was unaware of any AI component in the campaign.
“We are legit people,” she said. “It’s not AI. I’m not a robot. Everybody behind the scenes are not robots.”
The Committee for the First Amendment, which opposes the merger, called Neighbors for Strong Communities an “astroturf” campaign last month, after the latter group sent out text messages supporting the deal.
“How do you call something ‘astroturf’ when it’s driven by real people?” Tanner Kelly asked. “The claim that this is astroturf is an attempt to silence real people who are worried about jobs going away because they don’t agree with them politically.”
Roger Neal, a publicist who is helping with the press conference, argued that the antitrust case is politically motivated.
“They don’t like the fact that a conservative family owns a studio in Hollywood,” he said. “So what if there’s one studio that has conservative ownership? So what?”
