The New Hampshire Attorney General’s Office said Monday it was investigating reports of a robocall that allegedly used artificial intelligence to imitate President Joe Biden’s voice and discourage the state’s voters from going to the polls during Tuesday’s primary election.
Watch the briefing in the player above.
Attorney General John Formella said the recorded message, which was sent to several voters on Sunday, appears to be an illegal attempt to disrupt and suppress the vote. He said voters “should completely ignore the content of this message.”
A recording of the call reviewed by The Associated Press generates a voice similar to Biden’s and employs his oft-used phrase, “What a bunch of bullshit.” He then asks the listener to “save your vote for the November election.”
“Voting this Tuesday will only allow Republicans, in their quest to re-elect Donald Trump, to re-elect Donald Trump,” the voice imitating Biden said. “Your vote makes a difference in November, not this Tuesday.”
It is not true that voting in Tuesday’s primary prevents voters from voting in the November general election. Biden is not campaigning in New Hampshire and his name will not appear on Tuesday’s primary ballot after elevating South Carolina to first place in the Democratic primary, but his allies are running a write-in campaign for him in the state .
It is unclear who originated these calls, although they were falsely presented to recipients as coming from the personal cell phone number of Kathy Sullivan, a former chair of the state Democratic Party who helps lead Granite for America, a super-PAC supporting Biden’s entry. campaign.
Sullivan said she alerted law enforcement and filed a complaint with the attorney general after several constituents in the state said they received the call Sunday evening.
“This call refers to my personal cell phone number without my permission,” she said in a statement. “This is election interference, plain and simple, and clearly an attempt to harass me and other New Hampshire voters who plan to write to Joe Biden on Tuesday.”
It’s unclear exactly how many people received the call, but a spokeswoman for Sullivan said she heard from at least a dozen people who received it. The attorney general’s office encouraged anyone who received the call to email the state Department of Justice’s Election Law Unit.
Gail Huntley, a 73-year-old Democrat from Hancock, New Hampshire, who plans to write on Biden’s behalf on Tuesday, said she received the call Sunday around 6:25 p.m.
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She immediately recognized that the voice belonged to Biden, but quickly realized it was a scam because what he was saying made no sense. At first, she thought her comments were taken out of context.
“I didn’t think about it at the time, it wasn’t his real voice. It’s so compelling,” she said, adding that she was appalled but not surprised that such AI-generated counterfeits were spreading in her state.
White House Press Secretary Karine Jean Pierre confirmed Monday that the call “was indeed false and was not recorded by the president.” Biden campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez said in a statement that the campaign was “actively discussing additional actions to take immediately.”
“Spreading disinformation to suppress the vote and deliberately undermining free and fair elections will not stand, and fighting any attempts to undermine our democracy will continue to be a top priority for this campaign,” she said.
The apparent attempt at voter suppression using rapidly evolving generative AI technology is an example of what experts say will make 2024 a year of unprecedented election misinformation around the world.
Generative AI deepfakes have already appeared in 2024 presidential campaign ads, and the technology has been misused to spread disinformation in several elections around the world over the past year, from Slovakia to Indonesia and Taiwan.
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“We were concerned that generative AI would be used as a weapon in the next election and we see what is surely a sign of things to come,” said Hany Farid, a digital forensics expert at the University of California, Berkeley. , who reviewed the study. call recording and confirmed that it is a relatively low quality fake AI.
As AI technology improves, the federal government is still working to address it. Congress has yet to pass legislation to regulate the industry’s policy role, despite some bipartisan support. The Federal Election Commission is weighing public comments on a petition to regulate AI deepfakes in campaign ads.
Although the use of generative AI to influence elections is relatively new, “robocalls and dirty tricks go back a long way,” said David Becker, a former U.S. Department of Justice attorney and election law expert who directs now the Center for Election Innovation and Research. .
He said it was difficult to determine whether the primary goal of New Hampshire’s calls was to suppress the vote or simply “continue the process of getting Americans to detach themselves from the facts and the truth about our democracy.” .
“They don’t need to convince us that what they say, the lies they tell, are true,” he said. “They just have to convince us that there is no truth, that we cannot believe everything we are told.”
Katie Dolan, a campaign spokeswoman for Rep. Dean Phillips of Minnesota, who is challenging Biden in the Democratic primary, said Phillips’ team was not involved and only discovered the deepfake attempt when a reporter had called seeking comment.
“Any attempt to discourage voters is shameful and an unacceptable affront to democracy,” Dolan said in a statement. “The potential use of AI to manipulate voters is deeply worrying. »
The Trump campaign said it had nothing to do with the recording but declined further comment.
Associated Press writer Christina A. Cassidy contributed to this report from Atlanta.