Biden, Trump, AI, Oh My!
A coding script
Photo by Markus Spiske
Over the past few weeks, you may have noticed some cheeky videos circulating across social media. They feature former presidents, such as Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Joe Biden playing video games and providing voice-over commentary.
Surprisingly, these are not the real political figures themselves, nor are they real people speaking. The voice commentary is actually AI voice programmed to replicate the speech patterns of certain people. The use of AI in these videos was first spread by TikTok and has now gained recognition across the Internet.
The format of these videos is usually presented as the gameplay taking up the majority of the screen while a still-frame picture of the president takes the upper left corner. The video games range from Minecraft, Call of Duty, VRChat and many others. The discussion of these AI voices ranges from pop culture, random humor, politics and more.
These videos are usually made for comedic purposes. However, there have been reports of AI voices saying racial or homophobic slurs. Despite this, many people on Youtube and video-based social media platforms can’t get enough of them. Entertainment has always been evolving. Simply put, AI voices are the latest comedic trend.
Many people have praised this AI voice technology as an amazing feature. Some even believe it could revolutionize the entertainment industry or recreate people’s lost loved ones.
One example of this use of AI is in a recent episode of South Park. The plot of the episode revolves around the characters using ChatGPT to text people, rather than actually talk to them. The end credits for the episode even give credit to Trey Parker and ChatGPT. Regardless of whether or not this is a joke, it shows a glimpse into how far AI has come.
However, this kind of technology can easily be used to manipulate the media and individual people. Imagine you receive a call from someone you believe to be a relative and they ask for money. After you wire the money, you discover that it was actually an AI-generated voice.
According to a study from Oxford Academic, artificial intelligence (AI) technology has been widely applied to social media. AI arranges posts based on user preferences and helps users easily create and share social media posts. AI-based algorithms underlying social media make decisions and initiate actions when interacting with human users, suggesting that machine agency and human agency coexist in human-machine interactions on AI-based social media.
On a global scale, AI voice generation could become a major security threat. Any bad actor could send AI impersonations of major political and military figures to spread false information or to infiltrate secret facilities.
Do we really want to live in a world where we can’t trust a voice?