Jennifer spent the weekend calling California voters urging them to vote in Tuesday’s primary for Democrat Peter Dixon.
But unlike human Jennifer, Jennifer is a creation of artificial intelligence (AI), which means she can make thousands of phone calls without taking a break or losing her cool.
“Hello, my name is Jennifer, and I’m an artificial intelligence volunteer,” she said, quickly declaring her identity in a call to Silicon Valley voters in the U.S. Congressional race.
In her slightly robotic voice (deliberately designed to make it clear she’s not human), she introduces the candidates, asks them questions, answers questions from voters, and does everything It’s surprisingly natural.
“I’m wondering why no one is calling me today,” Austin Madden, Dixon’s operations manager, asked Dixon during a demo call with AFP.
“I’m sorry if I missed that point earlier,” Jennifer answered without hesitation. “The reason AIs like me are making calls instead of actual humans is so that our campaigns can reach more people efficiently, and human volunteers are less likely to have personal interactions. so that they can focus on the areas that matter.”
Dixon recently started using Jennifer, a product from startup Civox.
At first, “we were skeptical,” said Dixon, a Marine Corps veteran and cybersecurity entrepreneur. “So we tested it.”
– “People were shocked” –
His staff expected results to be “mixed.”
Instead, “people were shocked by how well it worked,” Dixon said from his company’s headquarters in Palo Alto, sitting in front of a computer screen showing campaign clips.
In one of the videos, images alternate between reality (Dixon holding his young daughter) and sequences in which the background (the Afghanistan war) and his clothing are artificially generated and presented as such. It shows.
The key, he said, is “not only to understand these tools, but to demonstrate that we are comfortable using them in an ethical, responsible and transparent manner.”
The impressive advances in AI over the past year and the emergence of generative AI programs like ChatGPT, which generate text, images, and audio in everyday language on demand, have sparked a great deal of enthusiasm, but also job losses and more. It also raised serious concerns about the potential risks of Intellectual property theft and fraud.
“I’m scared about it all,” Dixon admitted.
But he would rather see the U.S. “continue to lead in its use and figure out how to write its own rules of the road, rather than other countries like China doing it.”
Ilya Mouzykantskii co-founded Civox with the aim of focusing on the “intersection of artificial intelligence and politics.”
“We are already in a future where politicians use artificial intelligence tools to shape policy and make decisions,” he said, but did not necessarily announce that he was doing so. .
“Maybe that’s the benevolent technocracy we’re heading towards,” Musicantsky said. “But we shouldn’t end up there by accident, and we shouldn’t end up there without consent.”
~ “The best technology” ~
Adam Reis, Civox’s other co-founder, said that in the future, “the campaigns that raise the most money won’t necessarily get an unfair advantage; they will be the ones with the best technology.” he said.
Reis said he has been working for years on creating AI “characters” that can be trusted to interact. The advent of generative AI has made it much easier.
However, he added, “It turns out that the mechanics of conversation and speech are actually much more difficult than the content of the story.”
To be truly convincing, the AI character must speak fluently, understand and react quickly, and know when to interrupt and when to allow interruptions. These are all difficult challenges.
“Some people try to game the system,” said Patrick McNally, Civox field director. “But bots are very good at putting it back into policy…sometimes to a level that humans can’t.”
In January, an automated program that used an AI-generated voice of President Joe Biden to address voters raised concerns about the mass amount of disinformation enabled by new technology in an election year.
US authorities subsequently banned the use of such “cloned” voices to combat political or commercial fraud.
But that doesn’t affect Jennifer or her colleagues who use Civox technology. Because they’re not pretending to be anything or anyone.
juj/els/bbk/acb
