Their kids were shot, so they used AI to recreate their voices and call lawmakers

The parents of a teenager killed in the 2018 Parkland, Florida, school shooting have launched a bold new project called The Shotline to push for stricter gun laws in the country. The Shotline uses AI to recreate the voices of children killed by gun violence and send recordings via automated calls to lawmakers, The Wall Street Journal reported.

The project spear Wednesday, six years after a gunman killed 17 people and injured more than a dozen at a high school in Parkland, Florida. It features the voices of six children, some as young as ten years old, and young adults, who lost their lives in incidents of gun violence in the United States. Once you enter your zip code, The Shotline finds your local representative and lets you place a robocall from one of the six deceased people in their own voice, urging stricter gun control laws . “I’m back today because my parents used AI to recreate my voice to call you,” says the AI-generated voice of Joaquin Oliver, one of the teens killed in the Parkland shooting. “Other victims like me will also call.” At the time of publication, more than 8,000 calls for AI had been submitted to lawmakers through the website.

“This is a problem in the United States and we haven’t been able to solve it,” said Oliver’s father Manuel, who started the project with his wife Patricia. Newspaper. “If we have to use scary stuff to solve this problem, welcome to scary.”

To recreate the voices, the Olivers used a voice cloning service from ElevenLabs, a two-year-old startup that recently raised $80 million in a funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz. Using just a few minutes of voice samples, the software is able to recreate voices in more than two dozen languages. The Olivers allegedly used their son’s social media posts for his voice samples. Parents and legal guardians of victims of gun violence can fill out a form to submit their voices to The Shotline to be added to its repository of AI-generated voices.

The project raises ethical questions about using AI to generate deepfakes of voices belonging to dead people. Last week, the Federal Communications Commission declared robocalls made using AI-generated voices illegal, a move that came weeks after New Hampshire voters received calls impersonating President Joe Biden telling them not to vote in their state’s primaries. An analysis by a security company called Pindrop found that Biden’s deepfake audio was created using software from ElevenLabs.

The company’s co-founder, Mati Staniszewski, told the Newspaper that ElevenLabs allows people to recreate the voices of deceased loved ones if they have the rights and permissions. But so far it is unclear whether parents of minors had the right to their children’s images.