Wired: “Plenty of people are following the final days of the midterm election campaigns. Yale law researcher Rebecca Crootof has a special interest—a small wager. If she wins, victory will be bittersweet, like the Manhattan cocktail that will be her prize.”

“In June, Crootof bet that before 2018 is out an electoral campaign somewhere in the world will be roiled by a deepfake—a video generated by machine-learning software that shows someone doing or saying something that in fact they did not do or say. Under the terms of the bet, the video must receive more than 2 million views before being debunked.”

“A conservative group that creates undercover ‘sting’ videos infiltrated the campaign of Abigail Spanberger, a Democrat in a tight race with Rep. Dave Brat in Virginia’s 7th District,” the Washington Post reports.

“The campaign said a young woman working for Project Veritas posed as a Democratic volunteer and spent every day over the past several weeks in Spanberger’s suburban Richmond campaign office, performing basic office tasks — and peppering her office mates with questions that eventually raised red flags.”

Rep. Bob Brady’s (D-PA) “longtime political strategist has become the latest target in a widening federal probe of a $90,000 payment the congressman made to a primary challenger in 2012 to convince the man to drop out of the race,” the Philadelphia Inquirer reports.

“Ken Smukler, whom prosecutors have accused of helping to secretly funnel some of that money to the rival campaign, is expected to be indicted by a federal grand jury Tuesday.”

Said Brady: “He didn’t do nothing wrong. I don’t know what this is all about.”

“An automated army of pro-Donald Trump chatbots overwhelmed similar programs supporting Hillary Clinton five to one in the days leading up to the presidential election, according to a report published Thursday by researchers at Oxford University,” the New York Times reports.

“The chatbots — basic software programs with a bit of artificial intelligence and rudimentary communication skills — would send messages on Twitter based on a topic… Their purpose: to rant, confuse people on facts, or simply muddy discussions.”