A political consultant commissioned an AI-generated robocall using President Biden's voice to discourage New Hampshire Democratic voters from participating in the 2024 presidential primary, reaching thousands of voters before being traced and resulting in criminal charges.
In January 2024, just before New Hampshire's presidential primary on January 23, thousands of Democratic voters received robocalls featuring an AI-generated voice impersonating President Joe Biden that urged them not to vote in the primary. The calls told recipients to 'save your vote for the November election' and claimed that 'voting this Tuesday only enables the Republicans in their quest to elect Donald Trump again.' The calls were created using ElevenLabs AI voice cloning technology by Paul Carpenter, a New Orleans magician, who was hired by Steve Kramer, a Democratic political consultant working for presidential candidate Dean Phillips. Kramer paid Carpenter $150 to create the audio, which took less than 20 minutes and cost only $1 to generate. The calls spoofed the phone number of Kathy Sullivan, former New Hampshire Democratic Party chair who was leading a Biden write-in campaign. Authorities traced the distribution to Life Corporation in Texas and Lingo Telecom. The incident prompted investigations by the New Hampshire Attorney General, the FCC, and multiple state agencies. Steve Kramer was ultimately charged with 13 felony counts of voter suppression and 13 misdemeanor counts of impersonating a political candidate. The FCC proposed $6 million in fines against Kramer and $2 million against Lingo Telecom. The incident led to new FCC regulations clarifying that AI-generated robocalls are illegal and highlighted the ease with which AI voice cloning can be used for election interference.
Domain classification, causal taxonomy, severity scores, and national security assessments were LLM-classified and may contain errors.
Using AI systems to conduct large-scale disinformation campaigns, malicious surveillance, or targeted and sophisticated automated censorship and propaganda, with the aim of manipulating political processes, public opinion, and behavior.
Human
Due to a decision or action made by humans
Intentional
Due to an expected outcome from pursuing a goal
Post-deployment
Occurring after the AI model has been trained and deployed