LOUDOUN COUNTY, Va. — With just nine days to go before Virginia voters head to the polls, the lieutenant governor’s race is making headlines for an unprecedented use of artificial intelligence.

Republican candidate John Reid released a 40-minute YouTube video this week, showing himself debating an AI-generated version of Democratic Senator Ghazala Hashmi - a move her campaign says it did not grant permission for.

“He has shown himself to be an extremist in his views,” Hashmi told WUSA9 in an exclusive one-on-one interview. “He has targeted me in the same kind of language that Donald Trump has been using. His rhetoric against me has been xenophobic as well as Islamophobic.”

Hashmi’s campaign says she declined to debate Reid, and that his use of her image and voice through AI was not a

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