On August 16 local time, New York City Mayor Bloomberg posted a video on social media, captioned in Chinese with the words "Seeing the performance site", which sparked heated discussions.
In the video, he looked directly at the camera, smiled, and promoted Broadway in Mandarin.
At the beginning of the video, he introduced himself and said, “I don’t know Chinese, but I want to give it a try.” Then, he used Mandarin to describe the activity of distributing Broadway tickets in New York City.
On platform X, some users praised his Chinese proficiency, while others questioned that the video was generated by AI.
On August 16th, local time, Joe Calvello, the press secretary and chief spokesperson for Mamdani, shared the aforementioned video and stated, "It should be noted that this is not generated by AI."
On August 17th local time, Mamdani released footage of the shooting, captioning it with, "Can AI do this?"
The video shows that Mamdani made multiple mistakes during the filming process, and it seems that someone was giving him verbal instructions at the shooting site.
According to The New York Times, Mamdani had learned Mandarin. This was during the period from 2006 to 2010, when he attended Bronx Science High School. A spokesperson stated that after that, Mamdani did not use or study Mandarin anymore.
It is reported that the promotional video also has versions in English, Spanish, and Bengali. Mamdani grew up in Uganda and New York. During the campaign period, he often used languages other than English to communicate with voters, including Arabic, Hindi, and Urdu.
Mamdani recorded two Spanish-language videos during his campaign. Jake Blumencranz, a Republican state legislator from Long Island, questioned that his Spanish was so good as if it were genuine. He also commissioned an independent agency to analyze the videos to determine whether they were synthetic by AI. Blumencranz stated that the analysis revealed "signs of sufficient digital manipulation" in the videos.
In response, Mamdouni also released a teaser video.
