The mayor of New York speaks Mandarin, right? No, but he is making robocalls in several languages using AI

The use of artificial intelligence by the mayor of New York City, Eric Adams, to make robocalls that transform his voice into various languages he doesn’t actually understand raises fresh ethical concerns about how the government should be exploiting this quickly developing technology.

The robocalls, which the mayor said were made to advertise city employment events, have been going out in languages like Yiddish and Mandarin, the mayor told reporters on Monday.

They didn’t mention that he only speaks English or that AI was used to generate the calls. “People frequently stop me on the street and exclaim, ‘I had no idea you spoke Mandarin,’ you know? Democratic Adams remarked, “” To appeal directly to the diversity of New Yorkers, we are using several languages in our robocalls.

The calls come as regulators try to understand how to negotiate the use of artificial intelligence ethically and legally, where deepfake films or audio can give the impression that anyone, anywhere, is doing whatever a person on the other side of a computer screen wants them to do. The surveillance technology oversight project in New York criticized Adams’ robocalls as an immoral application of artificial intelligence that misleads city dwellers.

The organization’s executive director, Albert Fox Cahn, claimed that the mayor was “making deep fakes of himself.” “This is definitely unethical, especially when it’s done with tax dollars. It is blatantly Orwellian to use AI to trick New Yorkers into believing the man speaks languages when he doesn’t. Yes, announcements must be made.

Government officials and significant media firms have called for and taken steps toward tighter regulation in response to the growing use of artificial intelligence and deepfakes, particularly in politics. Google was the first major tech corporation to declare that it would impose new regulations on false political ads created by AI that could imitate a candidate’s voice or movements.

Although the company that owns Facebook and Instagram, Meta, doesn’t specifically prohibit AI-generated political advertisements, it does have a policy that forbids the use of “faked, manipulated, or transformed” audio and imagery for misinformation.

a U.S. bill that has bipartisan support. The Senate would outlaw “materially deceptive” deepfakes about federal candidates, with the exception of parody and satire.

Two Democratic lawmakers from the House of Representatives wrote a letter to the CEOs of Meta and X, formerly known as Twitter, last month to voice their disapproval of artificial intelligence (AI)-generated political ads on their social media networks.

Adams argued that his office is attempting to communicate with New Yorkers in the languages they speak in response to ethical concerns about his use of artificial intelligence. I have to govern the city, and I’m delighted to do that, so I have to be able to communicate with people in the languages that they understand, he said. So, all I have to say to everyone is, “Ni hao.”