Over the last month, some Spanish-speaking New Yorkers got a recorded phone call from Mayor Eric Adams speaking their native language. “Hola, soy el alcalde Eric Adams,” the mayor says in a monotone but flawless accent, before launching into a pitch for jobs with the city government. The truth is Adams isn’t multilingual, but he is a pioneer in the AI politics race.
In October, the mayor’s office said he’s been using AI to blast his constituents with millions of robocalls in languages he doesn’t speak, including Yiddish, Spanish, Mandarin, Haitian Creole, and Cantonese.
Maybe I’m old fashioned, but I would be offended to get an AI robocall from a politician, and it would make me less likely to vote for them, even if they were from the party I support.
Even if that politician called me personally I would feel this way. This is a statement about robocalls more than about AI.
However if they had a ChatGPT style interface for asking them in depth policy questions that would answer as they would answer, I would be all fucking in. That would be awesome.
Except it wouldn’t. It would tell you what they calculated that you wanted to hear—just like they do in debates.
This is my approach to sms spam as well, it makes my ballot much faster to fill out: I vote for whoever didn’t spam me
Right now it’s not as bad, but soon we wont be able to tell whether robocalls are humans or not.
I guess we can resort to having the one on the other line say stuff they shouldn’t be able to as an AI (I.E the classic “say penis x3 if you are human”)
I think I’d be able to tell it was fake if Ted Cruz rang to call me by name and give me a message in Swahili, no matter how convincing his tone may be.
It’s because it is an insult to your intelligence.
Yep “I spent zero effort on you and I think you’re stupid enough to feel special about a robocall”