CNN
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Joaquin Oliver’s voice echoes through the halls of Congress on the sixth anniversary of his death.
It comes from his mother’s cell phone outside the door to the lawmakers’ office on Capitol Hill. The disembodied voice of a 17-year-old student at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School has a message.
“Six years ago, I was a senior at Parkland. Many students and teachers were murdered on Valentine’s Day that year by a man using an AR-15 assault rifle. “It’s been six years, and you’ve done nothing. There’s been nothing to stop all the shootings since then.
“The thing is, I died that day in Parkland.” The sound continues. “My body was destroyed by a weapon of war. I came back today because my parents used AI to recreate my voice to call you.
The audio is one of six AI-generated voice messages from young people killed by gun violence, part of a new campaign launched last week by two groups, March for Our Lives and Change the Reef. To encourage lawmakers to act on gun control.
“My wife and I have been trying to use our voices for the past six years. Non-stop. We’ve tried almost every way to get people to pay attention to gun violence. We’ve been very successful. It didn’t happen,” says Manuel Oliver, who founded the Change the Reef advocacy group in his son’s memory after the 2018 shooting in Florida.
“So we decided, you know what? Let’s bring the voice of our loved ones. Let’s bring the voice of Joaquin.
A man heard his son’s voice over and over before signing
The new campaign website, called The Shot Line, invites people to listen to voice messages, enter zip codes and send calls to members of Congress.
The campaign began the same day a mass shooting at the Super Bowl victory parade in Kansas City killed one person and injured more than 20, including children. According to the Gun Violence Archive, there have been 50 mass shootings in the U.S. so far this year.
Ozzie Garcia, 10, who died in May 2022, is one of six children involved in the campaign.
“I love video games, telling jokes and making my friends laugh and jumping on the trampoline with my family,” Uzi’s AI-generated voice says in his message. “I’m a fourth grader at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. Or at least I was when a man with an AR-15 walked into my school and killed 18 of my classmates, two teachers and me. . That was almost two years ago. Nothing has changed. There have been more shootings.”
Uzi’s father, Brett Cross told CNN that he spent hours going through old playground videos on his phone to get the right audio of Ozzy’s voice. He says he worked with the campaign’s technology team to make sure the pitch was perfect and that he listened to Uzi’s AI voice repeatedly before signing off on its use.
“It was bittersweet because we get to hear his voice again,” he says. “But he should be here to speak for himself, and he’s not. So we have to be as creative as possible to get these politicians to listen to us.
Cross says he understands that using the voices of dead children to plead for gun control upsets some people. She says critics on social media have called the campaign unethical and “rude” and accused her of using her son as a “pawn” to push her gun control agenda. doing.
But he told CNN he was unfazed by the criticism.
“If you think it’s painful to hear my son’s voice after he’s gone, imagine what it’s like to be us – to be with him every day,” he says.
AI-generated voices can raise legal and ethical concerns.
Since the campaign began, more than 54,000 voice calls have been made to lawmakers, according to a trail on The Shotline site.
The campaign includes four other victims of gun violence: Ethan Song, 15, of Connecticut, who was accidentally shot and killed in 2018; Akila Daslova, 23, who was killed in a 2018 mass shooting in Tennessee. Mike Baughan, 30, of Maryland, who died by suicide in 2014. and Jaycee Webster, 20, who was shot and killed in a Maryland home in 2017.
more than that Two dozen Manuel Oliver says other parents have contributed audio of their children’s voices to the campaign for possible use in future calls.
The campaign comes as rapid advances in AI technology have made it easier to recreate people’s likenesses and voices, allowing scammers and other bad actors to send fake and manipulative messages.
The Federal Communications Commission allows political pre-recorded voice calls on landlines, even without prior authorization. But earlier this month, it announced that robocall scams using AI-generated voices are a violation of telecommunications law. The announcement comes after an AI-generated robocall that appeared to be President Biden telling New Hampshire voters to stay home ahead of the state’s January primary election.
Shotline messages are sent to lawmakers’ landlines and make it clear that the voices are generated by AI, Oliver says.
An expert told CNN that parents likely aren’t breaking FCC law because they’re transparent about their use of AI and don’t intend to deceive.
“If you examine this call from that perspective, it’s clear that it’s generated by AI, so if they have permission from the voice families that they’re using, and they’re in some TCPA (telephone (phones aren’t violating the Consumer Protection Act). Otherwise, it’s fine,” says Alex Quilici, CEO of robocall-blocking service YouMail. “Think of those old ads that said ‘celebrity voiceover’ – we were all good with them.”
But for some, the use of AI-generated voices of dead people in gun control campaigns may raise ethical concerns.
“It seems to straddle the line between a good use of AI and something questionable,” says Robert Wahl, an associate professor of computer science at Concordia University Wisconsin and an expert on the ethics of AI technology.
Creating AI voices is a complex process that involves a number of adjustments to ensure the inflection, timing and pitch are as close to the original voice as possible and don’t sound robotic, he says.
“It’s interesting because Hollywood has been doing this kind of thing with recreating dead actors for a while,” he told CNN. “And of course the technology is evolving almost on a daily basis. But I think it’s nice to be able to recreate the sound, as long as it’s OK with the immediate family.”
Manuel Oliver says he understands some people’s discomfort with the campaign’s AI-generated voices. Some parents who have lost children to gun violence were reluctant to participate in the project, he says.
But the goal is to jolt members of Congress and others into taking action on gun laws. And he says if it upsets some people – well, that’s it.
“If transparently using technology to bring a victim’s voice to life … if that hurts you, but you’re okay with shooting kids in parades and schools, then there’s something wrong with you. It is,” he says.
“No one should tell me what the hell is uncomfortable … because I can tell you what the uncomfortable feeling is. It’s never going to see my son again.