New York Mayor Eric Adams has used artificial intelligence to create robocalls that distort his own voice into several languages ​​he does not actually speak, raising new ethical questions about the government’s use of the rapidly evolving technology.

The mayor told reporters about the robocalls on Monday, saying they have gone out in languages ​​such as Mandarin and Yiddish to promote city hiring events. They didn’t include any revelation that he only speaks English or that the calls were generated using AI.

People stop me on the street all the time and say, I didn’t know you spoke Mandarin, you know? said Adams, a Democrat. The robocalls used used different languages ​​to speak directly to the diversity of New Yorkers.

The calls come as regulators struggle to get to grips with the best way to ethically and legally handle the use of artificial intelligence, where deepfake videos or audio can give the impression that anyone, anywhere is doing whatever a person does.

with the required technical skills

on the other side of a computer screen that she wants to do.

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In New York, the watchdog group Surveillance Technology Oversight Project condemned Adams’ robocalls as an unethical use of artificial intelligence that deceives city residents.

The mayor is making deepfakes of himself, said Albert Fox Cahn, the organization’s executive director. This is highly unethical, especially when it comes to the taxpayer’s dime. Using AI to convince New Yorkers that he speaks languages ​​he doesn’t is downright Orwellian. Yes, we need announcements in all the native languages ​​of New Yorkers, but the deepfakes are just a creepy vanity project.

The increasing use of artificial intelligence and deepfakes, especially in politics and election disinformation, has led to calls and moves toward greater regulation of the government and major media companies.

Google was the first major tech company to say it would impose new labels on misleading AI-generated political ads that could spoof a candidate’s vote or take action on election misinformation. Facebook and Instagram parent company Meta does not have a specific rule for AI-generated political ads, but it does have a policy that restricts spoofed, manipulated or transformed audio and images used for misinformation.

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A bipartisan bill in the U.S. Senate would ban materially misleading deepfakes related to federal candidates, with exceptions for parody and satire. This month, two Democratic members of Congress sent a letter to the heads of Meta and X, formally known as Twitter, to express their concerns about AI-generated political ads on their social media platforms.

In recent weeks, a number of tech companies have shown off AI tools that can synthetically dub a person’s speech into another language in a way that makes it sound as if that person is speaking in that language.

In September, music streaming service Spotify introduced an AI feature to translate a podcast into multiple languages ​​in the podcaster’s voice.

This month only, More recently,

the startup ElevenLabs

in October

introduced a voice translation tool that was said to be able to convert spoken content to another language in minutes, while retaining the voice of the original speaker.

Adams defended himself against ethical questions about his use of artificial intelligence, saying his office tries to reach New Yorkers through the languages ​​they speak.

“I have one thing: I have to run the city and I have to be able to talk to people in the languages ​​they understand, and I like to do that,” he said. And so I can only say to everyone:

No,.

”

that’s Mandarin for ‘hello’.