Democratic operative admits to commissioning Biden AI robocall in New Hampshire – The Washington Post

A longtime Democratic consultant working for a rival candidate admitted that he commissioned the artificial intelligence-generated robocall of President Biden that was sent to New Hampshire voters in January and triggered a state criminal investigation.

Steve Kramer, who worked for the long-shot Democratic presidential candidate Dean Phillips, said in a phone interview with The Washington Post that he sent out the AI-generated robocall telling voters to not vote to just under 5,000 people listed as most likely Democrats to vote in the New Hampshire primary, marking one of the first major uses of AI to disrupt the 2024 presidential election cycle.

The Phillips campaign paid Kramer roughly $250,000 to get Phillips, a third-term congressman from Minnesota challenging Biden, on the ballot in New York and Pennsylvania, according to federal campaign filings. Federal Communications Commission has issued him a subpoena for his involvement, Kramer said.

After the robocall, the Federal Communications Commission adopted a ruling that clarified generating a voice with AI for robocalls is illegal and swiftly issued a cease-and-desist letter to Kramer for originating illegal spoofed robocalls using an AI-generated voice in New Hampshire and issued a public notice to U.S.-based voice providers regarding blocking traffic related to the call.

The agency is working diligently including through all the tools available through its investigations to ensure that harmful misuse of AI technologies do not compromise the integrity of our communications networks, FCC spokesperson Will Wiquist said in a statement.

Kramer also shared details about how he created the robocall, confirming several details previously under speculation. He used software from the artificial intelligence voice cloning company Eleven Labs to create a deepfake voice of Biden in less than 30 minutes.

The calls, he added, were delivered by Voice Broadcasting, an entity associated with Life Co., which was at the center of the criminal investigation opened by New Hampshire Attorney General John Formella in early February into the Biden AI robocall. Kramer said the reason he created the robocall was to raise awareness about the dangers AI poses in political campaigns.

If anybody can do it, whats a person with real money, or an entity with real money, going to do? he said.

Kramers incident highlights the ease and accessibility by which AI-generated technology is making its way into the 2024 campaign cycle, allowing nearly anyone to use a wide array of tools to inject chaos and confusion into the voting process.

It also foreshadows a new challenge for state regulators, as increasingly advanced AI tools create new opportunities to interfere in elections across the world by creating fake audio recordings, photos and even videos of candidates, muddying the waters of reality.

The New Hampshire attorney generals investigation into the robocall remains active and ongoing, said Michael Garrity, a spokesman for the office.

Phillips and his campaign have condemned the robocalls. Katie Dolan, a spokeswoman for the Phillips campaign, said Kramers contract was finished before they became aware of his involvement in the robocall.

We are disgusted to learn that Mr. Kramer is behind this call, and we absolutely denounce his actions, she said. Kramers involvement was first reported by NBC News.

The robocall using an AI-generated voice that sounded like Biden targeted thousands of New Hampshire voters the weekend before the New Hampshire Democratic presidential primary, telling them their vote would not make a difference, according to investigators.

The call, which began with a catchphrase of Bidens, calling the election a bunch of malarkey, told voters: Its important that you save your vote for the November election. The call appeared to come from the number of the former New Hampshire Democratic Party chair Kathy Sullivan, who was helping an effort to get voters to write in Bidens name to show their support for the president, even though he wasnt on the ballot. Sullivan and others reported the call to the states attorney general.

In early February, Formella announced a criminal investigation into the matter, and sent the telecom company, Life Corp., a cease-and-desist letter ordering it to immediately stop violating the states laws against voter suppression in elections.

A multistate task force was also prepared for potential civil litigation against the company, and the FCC ordered Lingo Telecom to stop permitting illegal robocall traffic, after an industry consortium found that the Texas-based company carried the calls on its network.

Dont try it, Formella said in the February news conference. If you do, we will work together to investigate, we will work together with partners across the country to find you, and we will take any enforcement action available to us under the law. The consequences for your actions will be severe.

The robocall incident is also one of several episodes that underscore the need for better policies within technology companies to ensure their AI services are not used to distort elections, AI experts said.

In late January, ChatGPT creator OpenAI banned a developer from using its tools after the developer built a bot mimicking Phillips. His campaign had supported the bot, but after The Post reported on it, OpenAI deemed that it broke rules against use of its tech for campaigns.

Paul Barrett, deputy director of the New York University Stern Center for Business and Human Rights, said in an email that it is apparent how powerful AI deepfakes can be in disrupting elections. The new technology makes it far easier for nonexperts to generate highly persuasive content that is fraudulent and can potentially mislead people about when, how, or where to vote, he said.

This is also not the first time Kramer has used AI to spoof a politicians voice. Last year, he created an AI-generated robocall of Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) asking nearly 300 likely Republican voters in South Carolina whom they would support if former president Donald Trump wasnt on the ballot.

Kramer, who said he plans to support Biden if he wins the Democratic nomination, said he hopes his actions have inspired regulators to take notice of AIs potential impact on the election.

Its here now, he said, referring to AI, and I did something about it.

Clara Ence Morse, Eva Dou, and Razzan Nakhlawi contributed to this report.

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Democratic operative admits to commissioning Biden AI robocall in New Hampshire - The Washington Post

Why Argentinians are gambling everything on ‘anarcho-capitalist’ Javier Milei podcast – The Guardian

Hes known as the madman, his hairdresser likens him to Wolverine, while the man himself prefers the term anarcho-capitalist. But this week Javier Milei has a new title: president of Argentina.

By now the world should not be surprised by a far-right TV personality with attention-grabbing hair winning at the polls, but Mileis meteoric rise up the ranks of Argentinian politics still shocked observers. On the election trail, he promised to close the central bank, dollarise the economy and insulted Argentinas biggest trading partners, China and Brazil. But what will he do now that he has power?

The Guardians Latin America correspondent, Tom Phillips, has been in Buenos Aires for Mileis inaugaration. He tells Nosheen Iqbal how he has spoken to everyone from former ministers to astrologers to try to understand Mileis appeal and speculates how Argentina will fare under the former Rolling Stones tribute band member. He explains the toll sky-high inflation is taking on the people of Argentina and why voters would rather risk everything on Milei than prop up the status quo.

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Why Argentinians are gambling everything on 'anarcho-capitalist' Javier Milei podcast - The Guardian

Conservative towns in liberal American states want to ban abortion – The Economist

On December 10th about a dozen people file into a church in Seminole, Texas. Upbeat Christmas music plays softly over the speakers as people take their seats in wooden pews. But the pastor is not the main speaker. He hands the microphone to Mark Lee Dickson, an anti-abortion activist, and David Gallegos, a state senator for New Mexico. The two men explain how their plan to ban abortion in eastern New Mexico could deter women from neighbouring Texas from crossing state lines for the procedure. They are coming, says Mr Gallegos. The only way to stop death in my state is help from your state.

New Mexicos role in Americas abortion wars derives largely from its geography. Abortion in the state is legal throughout all stages of pregnancy. But New Mexico shares a border with Texas and Oklahoma, where the procedure is illegal, and touches Arizona and Utah, which have restrictions. The Guttmacher Institute, a pro-abortion research group, finds that abortions in New Mexico more than tripled between 2020 and 2023, the largest percentage increase of any state. Adrienne Mansanares, chief executive of Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains, reckons that more than 80% of patients at the groups clinic in Las Cruces, New Mexico, come from Texas.

New Mexico has thus become a target for anti-abortion activists. Mr Dickson initially sought merely to limit abortion in cities and counties in Texas. But in 2021 the state passed SB8, which in effect banned the procedure, and a year later the Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade. The emboldened activist now has his sights set on eastern New Mexico, which is home to plenty of conservative, rural communities that chafe against the states progressive government and permissive abortion laws. Its basically West West Texas, says Laura Wight, a member of Eastern New Mexico Rising, a rare progressive group in the region.

Several municipalities in New Mexico recently passed ordinances that endeavour to ban abortion despite state law. The states attorney-general sued them, and the case came before New Mexicos Supreme Court on December 13th. The ordinances have two goals. The first is to deter Texas women from seeking an abortion in New Mexico. Whole Womans Health, which runs abortion clinics, recently considered opening an office in Hobbs, just across the state line from Seminole, but decided on progressive Albuquerque instead. Hobbs is right in line for getting abortion clinics and weve been fighting that tooth and toenail, says Jan Auld, a Hobbs resident who attended the church meeting in Seminole.

Second, Mr Dickson and his supporters want the New Mexico ordinances to bolster their argument that a federal law on the books since 1873, known as the Comstock Act, already in effect blocks abortion nationwide. The Comstock Act is an ambiguous anti-vice law that prohibits the mailing of obscene or lewd materials, including things related to contraception and abortion. Some argue that it could be used to block the shipping of any tools used for abortion, making the procedure difficult to perform at all.

The law was only ever patchily enforced, explains Mary Ziegler, a legal historian at the University of California, Davis. It was this sort of weird relationship between government and social-movement activists, she adds. There were very few prosecutions even before Roe established a constitutional right to abortion in 1973. But the eastern New Mexico ordinances assert that Comstock is the supreme law of the land, thereby trumping any New Mexico law that protects abortion.

New Mexicos Supreme Court will probably disagree. During oral arguments the justices appeared loth to consider Comstock at all. They seem minded to rule that the new local laws violate state law: case closed. But the debate over Comstock will rage on. A federal judge in Texas recently ruled that the 150-year-old law plainly forecloses mail-order abortion, referring to the Food and Drug Administrations approval of mifepristone, a drug used to end a pregnancy. The Supreme Court will hear the case in 2024.

The question of whether, and how, Comstock is enforced will also loom over the 2024 presidential election. The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think-tank that has published detailed policy plans for a second Donald Trump term, contends that the next conservative administration should announce its intent to enforce federal law against providers and distributors of such pills.

David Cohen, a law professor at Drexel University, argues that, should he lose the election, in the lame-duck period before he leaves office President Joe Biden should consider pardoning anyone who may have violated the Comstock Act. The Biden administration is not going to enforce that law, Mr Dickson tells those gathered at the church. But another administration might.

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Conservative towns in liberal American states want to ban abortion - The Economist