Knox County Commissioners AI image incident — Jul 2024
A nonprofit used AI and astroturfing to manufacture fake grassroots support for controversial Flock license-plate readers in Knox County, Tennessee.
- Incident date
- Jul 2024
- Target
- Knox County Commissioners
In July 2024, residents of Knox County, Tennessee, began receiving text messages from an unfamiliar organization called Neighbors for Strong Communities. The group solicited support for Flock license-plate readers, offering to use artificial intelligence to draft emails for residents to send to public officials. The effort, which targeted local decision-makers during a contentious debate over privacy and surveillance, was later identified as a sophisticated astroturfing campaign.
What happened
The campaign utilized a combination of localized text messaging and AI-generated content to influence public opinion. Residents received texts from local area codes, creating an illusion of grassroots origin, despite the nonprofit being incorporated in Washington, D.C. by political consultants. When recipients engaged with the group’s digital tools, they found that the software would only generate supportive emails if the user indicated they favored the Flock cameras; those expressing opposition were not provided with draft messages.
Evidence of the campaign's synthetic nature emerged when local resident Ashley Smith investigated the group. She discovered that the nonprofit’s website featured AI-generated imagery, specifically a photo of a man with six fingers, and that the organization’s listed addresses were associated with a restaurant and a UPS store rather than a legitimate community office. Furthermore, the URLs linked to the text messages were associated with Influent, a company specializing in AI-generated correspondence for lobbyists.
Despite the nonprofit’s efforts to flood county commissioners with unique but similarly phrased emails, the campaign failed to sway local officials. The Knox County commission ultimately voted to cancel the Flock contract. Critics, including advocacy groups like Free Press, described the operation as a textbook example of astroturfing—the practice of manufacturing fake grassroots support to manipulate public policy. Neither Flock nor Neighbors for Strong Communities provided comments regarding the campaign’s origins or their professional relationship.