Two days before the New Hampshire primary, voters in the state received robocalls carrying a recording that imitated President Biden's voice. It urged them not to vote in Tuesday's primary but to "save your vote for the November election," and the caller ID had been spoofed to show the number of a local political consultant. The state attorney general's office opened an investigation the next day; who had sent the calls was not known at that point. Pindrop, a voice-fraud detection firm that analysed the audio against more than a hundred text-to-speech systems, was reported to have concluded it was "almost certainly created with ElevenLabs' technology." Bloomberg, citing a person who asked not to be named, reported that ElevenLabs had traced the audio to an account and suspended it; the company said it does not comment on individual cases and has not said whose account it was. It was taken as the case of a real politician's cloned voice reaching American voters directly, on the phone.
21January 2024
PolicyConfirmed
Robocalls with a cloned Biden voice tell voters to stay home
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Also mentioned
Not parties to this event, but named in the text above.
Tags
- deepfake
- voice
- election
Sources
Later developments
23 May 2024 · Development
The FCC said political consultant Steve Kramer was responsible for the campaign, found it to have apparently violated the Truth in Caller ID Act's ban on spoofing, and proposed a $6 million fine. It brought a separate action the same day against Lingo Telecom, which had carried the calls.