-- KamilaKoronska - 07 Jun 2024

Tarantino, Cameron and Donald Tusk: How Law and Justice party appropriated Hollywood movies and used face-swap technology for their EU Parliamentary election video

Aurthor: Kamila Koronska

Just a few days before the EU parliamentary elections, Poland's populist right-wing party, Law and Justice, have offered their voters a rare cinematic experience. In a campaign ad discrediting Donald Tusk's opposition party, they unleashed their editing powerhouse to create a political collage using 2-second excerpts from Hollywood classics and old campaign videos from other parties. Some of these excerpts were AI-enhanced to create a stronger satirical effect.

Fig. 1 Keyframe story-board of the Law and Justice party ad titled (eng On June 9th, choose the lucky 7 and vote for Law and Justice!) created with InVid -WeVerify plugin.

The video opens with a two-second clip taken from Tarantino’s ‘Four Rooms'—a lesser-known movie by the director, who is famous for creating films that are often chaotic symphonies themselves. The political collage includes also two-second fragments from other famous productions, such as ‘The Graduate’ (1967), ‘The Gladiator’ (2000), ‘Titanic’ (1997), Anger Management (2003) and the widely known Polish comedy ‘Mis’ (1981)

How things are

The Law and Justice PR team selected the final scene from the ‘Misbehavers’ chapter of the film (Tarantino divides his films into chapters) for their opening. In this scene, the protagonist, an unlucky bellboy named Ted, finds himself in a shambolic situation that in film studies serves as a classic portrayal of a total loss of control: the room is on fire, and the children Ted was told to look after are smoking cigarettes and drinking from a bottle of liquor. There is a decomposed dead body in the box spring of the bed. The viewers watching the dec-ontextualised fragment of the film in the Law and Justice’s political ad are informed by a guiding voice-over narrator that ‘this is how things are’.

The video then abruptly cuts to two opposition politicians, Szymon Hołownia (Marshal of the Sejm of the Republic of Poland) and Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz (Poland's current Minister of National Defence), strolling down a country road. The fragment was taken out from an original ad for the ‘the Third Way’, a political alliance that was formed to oust the previous government, during the parliamentary election in October 2023.

The voice-over narrator then continues to explain that the anecdotal road that these two politicians are marching on, and taking voters with them leads to Donald Tusk (his face overwritten with the word ‘PAUSE’), who is then linked to yet another symbolic object - an iceberg. Specifically, the James Conrad iceberg from the 1997 movie Titanic. But just before the voters see the ship crashing into the wall of ice, they are shown another reappropriated movie clip. This time, a tampered movie clip shows Kate Winslet in a lover's embrace with Leonardo DiCaprio, but their faces have been swapped for those of Donald Tusk and Szymon Hołownia. If true, it wouldn’t be the first time technology was used to poke fun at politicians, regardless of how reckless the decision might appear in the current debate about the use of AI for political purposes, and the ethics of political campaigning more broadly.

We used TrueMedia.org synthetic non-profit AI detection tool to see whether there has been AI technology used in production of this video. The tool has been created by Dr Oren Etzoni, from the University of Washington.

According to the analysis produced by the tool, there is substantial evidence of manipulation in the video overall. This could be a result of the extensive editing required to produce the collage, to which the AI detection tools are still sensitive. Interestingly, however, the tool gave us a score of 87%, suggesting a high likelihood of AI manipulation of the faces in the video, due to potential use of a face-swap technology.

Fig.2 Image with face-swapping taken from James Conrad’s Titanic (1997) and used in the Law and Justice (PiS)'s EU's ad.

Fig.3 Original shot from the James Conrad’s Titanic (1997)

Possible copy-right law infringements

According to copyright lawyer from Poland, Magdalena Miernik-Grzesiowska from the Lookreatywni law consultancy, the spot uses movie clips, relying on a provision of the 'right to quote' (Article 29 [1] of the act) which permits limited use of someone’s materials in one's own work without needing the author’s consent. The provision somehow extends the scope of the ‘classical’ right of equation by allowing the re-use of materials also for the purpose of creating parody, pastiche or caricature. However, as Miernik-Grzesiowska points out the scope of permissible use could be waved away when the protected work is used for ‘the purpose of presenting a discriminatory message’ or one that ‘infringes the rights of third parties’. In such an event, the use does not exclude the unlawfulness of the conduct.

One can also debate what the public interest is in these videos and whether the right to quote can be extended to political campaigning in general. The Law and Justice video also puts the authors of these movies in an uncomfortable situation by politicizing their work to make a comment on the current government.

Fig. 4 Screenshot from the Law and Justice's video clip showing an appropriated and reedited excerpt from Donald Tusk's campaign video.

Fig. 5 Original shot from the Quentin Tarantino's 'Four Rooms' (1997).

Additionally, the credits only include the name of the movie and the director, without crediting the film production companies. The ad also credits the sources inconsistently and incorrectly when it appropriates excerpts from the campaign videos of the opposition parties, citing sources simply as YouTube or Twitter.

The video has been shared on official channels of the Law and Justice party on Youtube, Facebook, and Twitter. It was watched 54,198 times on YouTube, 672.6 times on X (formerly Twitter) and received 6.5 reactions on Facebook. In their response to the video, people generally praised the collage for its originality, with only a few users pointing out the problematic way Hollywood classics have been re-attributed, and re-edited using what appears to be AI technology.