It’s not known who is behind the calls, though they falsely showed up to recipients as coming from the personal cellphone number of Kathy Sullivan, a former state Democratic Party chairwoman who helps run Granite for America, a super-PAC supporting the Biden write-in campaign.
Sullivan said she alerted law enforcement and issued a complaint to the Attorney-General after multiple voters in the state reported receiving the call on Sunday night.
“This call links back to my personal cellphone number without my permission,” she said in a statement. “It is outright election interference, and clearly an attempt to harass me and other New Hampshire voters who are planning to write in ‘Joe Biden’ on Tuesday.”
It was unclear how many people received the call, but a spokesperson for Sullivan said she heard from at least a dozen people who received it. The Attorney-General’s office encouraged anyone who has received the call to email the state justice department’s election law unit.
Gail Huntley, a 73-year-old Democrat in Hancock, New Hampshire who plans to write in Biden’s name on Tuesday, said she received the call about 6.25pm on Sunday.
She instantly recognised the voice as belonging to Biden but quickly realised it was a scam because what he was saying didn’t make sense. Initially, she figured his words were taken out of context.
“I didn’t think about it at the time that it wasn’t his real voice. That’s how convincing it was,” she said, adding that she is appalled but not surprised AI-generated fakes like this are spreading in her state.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre confirmed Monday that the call “was indeed fake and not recorded by the president.” Biden’s campaign manager, Julie Chavez Rodriguez, said in a statement that the campaign is “actively discussing additional actions to take immediately”.
“Spreading disinformation to suppress voting and deliberately undermine free and fair elections will not stand, and fighting back against any attempt to undermine our democracy will continue to be a top priority for this campaign,” she said.
The apparent attempt at voter suppression using rapidly advancing generative AI technology is one example of what experts warn will make 2024 a year of unprecedented election disinformation around the world.
Generative AI deepfakes already have appeared in campaign ads in the 2024 presidential race, and the technology has been misused to spread misinformation in multiple elections across the globe over the past year, from Slovakia to Indonesia and Taiwan.
“We have been concerned that generative AI would be weaponised in the upcoming election and we are seeing what is surely a sign of things to come,” said Hany Farid, an expert in digital forensics at the University of California, Berkeley, who reviewed the call recording and confirmed it is a relatively low-quality AI fake.
As AI technology improves, the federal government is still scrambling to address it. Congress has yet to pass legislation seeking to regulate the industry’s role in politics despite some bipartisan support. The Federal Election Commission is weighing public comments on a petition for it to regulate AI deepfakes in campaign ads.
Though the use of generative AI to influence elections is relatively new, “robocalls and dirty tricks go back a long way”, said David Becker, a former US Department of Justice attorney and election law expert who now leads the Centre for Election Innovation and Research.
He said it’s hard to determine whether the main intent of the New Hampshire calls was to suppress voting or simply to “continue the process of getting Americans to untether themselves from fact and truth regarding our democracy”.
“They don’t need to convince us that what they’re saying, the lies they’re telling, are true,” he said. “They just need to convince us that there is no truth, that you can’t believe anything you’re told.”
Katie Dolan, a spokeswoman for the campaign of Rep. Dean Phillips of Minnesota, who is challenging Biden in the Democratic primary, said Phillips’ team was not involved and only found out about the deepfake attempt when a reporter called seeking comment.
“Any effort to discourage voters is disgraceful and an unacceptable affront to democracy,” Dolan said in a statement. “The potential use of AI to manipulate voters is deeply disturbing.”
The Trump campaign said it had nothing to do with the recording but declined further comment.
