Concerns over the weaponization of generative artificial intelligence are again at the fore after Democrats in New Hampshire over the weekend received faked robocalls from President Joe Biden telling them not to bother voting in Tuesday’s primary election, according to the state attorney general’s office.

It’s unclear just how many people received the call that sounded more or less like Biden (pictured). “Voting this Tuesday only enables the Republicans in their quest to elect Donald Trump again,” the deepfaked voice says. “Your vote makes a difference in November, not this Tuesday.” The recording also included a phrase Biden has been known to utter: “What a bunch of malarkey.”

Indeed. Such deceptive audio technology has been around for some time but has been improving of late. A major concern has been that manipulated voice and video may threaten the U.S. general election this year. This is one reason why there have been calls to regulate AI companies, especially as the technology becomes more widely available to people who can create manipulated content without much skill – if any.

“The political deepfake moment is here,” Robert Weissman, president of the progressive watchdog group Public Citizen, said in a statement. “Policymakers must rush to put in place protections or we’re facing electoral chaos. The New Hampshire deepfake is a reminder of the many ways that deepfakes can sow confusion and perpetuate fraud.”

Right now, lawmakers are considering two different approaches to dealing with the issue of AI-generated content: Either ban it when it’s deceptively mimicking someone’s voice or image, or at least make it so all content of this type comes with an obvious disclosure concerning what it is. Democrats in New Hampshire already proposed such a bill at the start of the year.

Just yesterday, OpenAI banned a startup that developed a chatbot that mimics the Democratic presidential candidate. Earlier in January, the World Economic Forum went as far as to state that the biggest threat to the global economy over the next few years is AI-powered misinformation and disinformation.

As for the New Hampshire fake, it’s still uncertain who was behind it. The calls showed – falsely –that the number belonged to Kathy Sullivan, a former state Democratic Party chair who currently helps with Granite for America, a super-PAC that supports the Biden campaign. Sullivan said she reported this fake content to law enforcement and sent a complaint to the attorney general, in which she remarked, “These kinds of tactics, if left unpunished, will only get worse in the future.”

Photo: Gage Skidmore/Flickr