The parents of a teenager killed in the 2018 Parkland, Florida, school shooting have launched a bold new project called The Shotline to lobby for stricter gun laws in the country. . Shotline uses AI to recreate the voices of children killed by gun violence and sends the recordings to lawmakers through automated calls. wall street journal report.
project launched Wednesday marked six years since a gunman killed 17 people and injured more than a dozen others at a high school in Parkland, Florida. The film features the voices of six children (some as young as 10) and young people who have lost their lives to gun violence across the United States. Enter your zip code and The Shotline will find your local representative and place an automated call from one of the six dead, speaking live and advocating for stronger gun control. “I’m back today because my parents used his AI to recreate my voice to call you,” says teenager killed in Parkland shooting. says one of his AI-generated voices, Joaquin Oliver. “Other victims like me will be calling too.” At the time of publication, more than 8,000 of his AI calls had been sent to lawmakers through the website.
“This is America’s problem, and we haven’t solved it,” said Oliver’s father, Manuel, who co-founded the project with his wife, Patricia. journal. “If you need to use creepy to fix that, welcome to creepy.”
To recreate the audio, the Olivers turned to the voice cloning service of ElevenLab, a two-year-old startup that recently raised $80 million in a funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz. Using just a few minutes of audio samples, this software can reproduce her voice in over 24 languages. The Olivers reportedly used their son’s social media posts as audio samples. Parents or legal guardians of gun violence victims can fill out a form to submit their voices to her The Shotline to be added to the repository of AI-generated voices.
The project raises ethical questions about using AI to generate deepfakes of dead people’s voices. Last week, the Federal Communications Commission declared robocalls using AI-generated voices illegal, but the decision means New Hampshire voters impersonating President Joe Biden will not vote in the state’s primary. The decision came a few weeks after he received a phone call telling him to do so. An analysis by security firm Pindrop revealed that Biden’s audio deepfake was created using software from Eleven Labs.
Matty Staniszewski, co-founder of the company, said: journal Eleven Lab allows users to recreate the voices of deceased relatives if they have the right and permission to do so. However, it is currently unclear whether the minor’s parents had image rights to the child.