It’s only a matter of time before Artificial Intelligence crosses the river and winds up in New Jersey politics.
POLITICO New York Playbook reported this morning that an AI-generated audio featuring a New York City political boss “talking smack” about an assemblywoman “went mini-viral among Harlem political players on Sunday.”
“It’s the first instance — at least that Playbook is aware of — of somebody using an artificial intelligence voice for nefarious purposes in New York politics,” the Playbook editors wrote. “But it won’t be the last time. An AI-generated robocall impersonating President Joe Biden this weekend told people not to vote in the New Hampshire primary.”
Playbook said that the audio was “believable enough to fool some people.”
“We’re at a whole different reality with misinformation and having to question the provenance of stuff,” Melissa Mark-Viverito, former City Council Speaker, told Playbook. But when the Manhattan Democrat first got the audio in a group text Sunday, “that’s not what came to mind. I was like, ‘Oh shit.’ I thought it was real.”
In New Jersey, Assembly Majority Leader Louis Greenwald has proposed legislation that would make deceptive AI audio and video in political campaigns a crime.
“We’re grappling with something serious here; the potential for a wonderful expansion of technology comes with it the very real dangers of misuse,” Greenwald told the New Jersey Globe in May. “AI technology exists that can manipulate voices and images to make it realistically appear that someone has said something they never did.”
To illustrate his point, Greenwald submitted an Op-Ed to the New Jersey Globe that was generated entirely through AI.