Unknown criminals are blasting New Hampshire Democrats with an apparently AI-generated robocall of President Biden in what the state’s Attorney General is calling an “unlawful attempt” to suppress the vote.
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“Voting this Tuesday only enables the Republicans in their quest to elect Donald Trump again,” robo-Biden says on the call potential voters received on Sunday. “Your vote makes a difference in November, not this Tuesday.”
White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre confirmed that the recording of the phone call is fake at a Monday briefing, but declined to comment in detail as an investigation is ongoing.
Jean-Pierre noted the White House expects deepfakes to be an ongoing problem. “We have to be mindful. There are gonna be deep fakes,” Jean-Pierre said. “That’s why the president has taken this very seriously over the last couple of years here.”
For years, experts warned that the coming AI revolution would spark an unprecedented wave of disinformation warfare. The Biden deepfake is a fairly unsophisticated attempt that’s unlikely to spark serious consequences but opens a new chapter of election tampering the world is entirely unprepared to face.
New Hampshire’s Jan. 23 election marks the first primary in the 2024 election cycle. This year’s primaries are mostly inconsequential, with an incumbent President on one side of the aisle and former president Trump leading by double digits on the other. The candidates are all but decided, but the AI robocalls seem like a convoluted attempt to embarrass Biden’s reelection caption.
The Democratic National Committee reorganized its primary cycle to boost South Carolina—where Biden enjoyed a decisive victory in the last primary—and demote New Hampshire, where Biden came in fifth in 2020. The DNC marks South Carolina’s Feb. 3 election as the first officially sanctioned primary, meaning Biden’s doesn’t actually appear on Tuesday’s ballot in New Hampshire.
However, Kathy Sullivan, former New Hampshire Democratic Party chair, has been running a Super PAC to encourage voters to write in Biden’s name anyway to bolster the President. Convincing Biden supporters to stay home could scuttle that effort, and the AI Biden robocall points to Sullivan’s phone number in an apparent jab at the campaign.
“The message appears to have been ‘spoofed’ to falsely show that it had been sent by the treasurer of a political committee that has been supporting the New Hampshire Democratic Presidential Primary write-in efforts for President Biden,” the New Hampshire Attorney General’s office said in a press release Monday. “The message’s content directed recipients who wished to be removed from a calling list to call the number belonging to this person.” The Attorney General’s office said it’s investigating complaints about the calls.
NBC News published a recording of the robocall, which is a jittering, low-quality affair. Anyone with passing familiarity with AI (or a basic understanding of American civics) could spot the call as an obvious fake. And even if it’s successful, killing the write-in campaign is unlikely to have any meaningful effect on Biden’s prospects in November. However, a similar effort in more significant primaries or swing states in the general election could have serious consequences. The Biden deepfake may be a sign of grim things on the horizon.