The Federal Communications Commission this month outlawed robocalls that use voices generated by artificial intelligence.
The 1991 Telephone Consumer Protection Act bans artificial voices in robocalls. The FCC’s Feb. 8 ruling declares that AI-generated voices, including clones of real people’s voices, are artificial and therefore banned by law.
The move comes on the heels of a robocall on Jan. 21 – two days before the New Hampshire primary – from what sounded like President Joe Biden. The call had Biden’s voice urging voters inclined to support Biden and the Democratic Party not to participate in New Hampshire’s Jan. 23 GOP primary election. The call falsely implied that a registered Democrat could vote in the Republican primary and that a voter who voted in the primary would be ineligible to vote in November.
The call appears to have been an artificial intelligence deepfake. It also appears to have been an attempt to discourage voting.
The FCC and the New Hampshire attorney general’s office are investigating, and on Feb. 6, N.H. Attorney General John Formella identified two Texas companies, Life Corp. and Lingo Telecom, as the source and transmitter, respectively, of the call.
Robocalls in elections are nothing new and not illegal; many are simply efforts to get out the vote. But they have also been used in voter suppression campaigns. Compounding this problem in this case is the application of AI to clone Biden’s voice.
In a media ecosystem full of noise, scrambled signals such as deepfake robocalls make it virtually impossible to tell facts from fakes.
Recently, a number of companies have popped up online offering impersonation as a service. Though the audio and video output is usually choppy and stilted, when the audio is delivered via a robocall, it’s very believable.
I’m a media and disinformation scholar. In 2019, information scientist Brit Paris and I studied how generative adversarial networks – what most people today think of as AI – would transform the ways institutions assess evidence and make decisions when judging realistic-looking audio and video manipulation. What we found was that no single piece of media is reliable on its face; rather, context matters in making an interpretation.
When it comes to AI-enhanced disinformation, the believability of deepfakes hinges on where you see or hear them or who shares them. Without a valid and confirmed source vouching for it as a fact, a deepfake might be interesting or funny but will never pass muster in a courtroom. However, deepfakes can still be damaging when used in efforts to suppress the vote or shape public opinion.
AI-enhanced disinformation campaigns are difficult to counter because unmasking the source requires tracking a trail of metadata. And right now, research on audio and video manipulation is more difficult because many big tech companies have shut down access to their application programming interfaces, and the companies have laid off their trust and safety teams.
In many ways, AI-enhanced disinformation such as the New Hampshire robocall poses the same problems as every other form of disinformation. People who use AI to disrupt elections are likely to do what they can to hide their tracks, which is why it’s necessary for the public to remain skeptical about claims that do not come from verified sources, such as local TV news or social media accounts of reputable news organizations.
I believe society needs to learn to venerate what I call TALK: timely, accurate, local knowledge. It’s important to design social media systems that value timely, accurate, local knowledge.
It’s also important to make it more difficult for disinformers to profit from undermining democracy. For example, the malicious use of technology to suppress voter turnout should be vigorously investigated by federal and state law enforcement authorities.
While deepfakes may catch people by surprise, they should not catch us off guard, no matter how slow the truth is compared with the speed of disinformation.
Joan Donovan is an assistant professor of journalism and emerging media studies at Boston University. Distributed by The Associated Press.
