I followed with fascination the recent parliamentary elections in Pakistan this month.

Candidates backed by Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party, or PTI, won 99 seats, the most of any party. The strong showing in and of itself was not necessarily a surprise. Khan, a former cricket star turned Islamist politician with a significant grassroots following, commands a fiercely loyal base.

Rather, the surprising element was that Khan’s party won while Khan is imprisoned. Khan was disqualified from running in the election because of criminal convictions. He contends that his sentences and a slew of pending legal cases against him have been politically motivated. Moreover, the candidates of Khan’s party were forced to run as independents after they were barred from using the party symbol — a cricket bat — to help illiterate voters find them on ballots.

How did a barred party campaign for election while its leader remained incarcerated ?

The answer, like in many things these days, is AI. Imran Khan’s campaign team used AI to generate speeches in Khan’s voice and style, diffusing them across social media platforms like Tiktok, which often went viral. Welcome to the new age of AI-based electioneering.

This whole incident in Pakistan led me to thinking about how it juxtaposes onto another noteworthy event in world affairs last week: the death in a Siberian prison of Alexei Navalny, the Russian dissident and political opposition threat to the regime.

The phenomenal courage of Navalny and his incredible journey — poisoned twice, and jailed upon return to Russia — elevates his candidacy for martyrdom upon his death last week.

But what does it mean to be a martyr now in this age of generative AI ?

Perhaps the world will continue to hear from Navalny beyond the grave.