A fake robocall on behalf of Biden urging him not to vote for Democrats in the US election turned out to be a dipfake

Patrick Semansky/AP

Disinformation experts believe that a recent automated phone call on behalf of US President Joe Biden urging New Hampshire voters not to vote in the Democratic primary is likely a dipfake generated by artificial intelligence.

Here's What We Know

According to experts, this is indicated by the unnatural cadence of speech in the audio recording. In addition, modern neural networks for speech generation are able to imitate the voices of real people, including politicians, from small audio samples with high accuracy.

Experts note that dipfake technologies are not regulated and can be used to their detriment. For example, this spoofing is an attempt to suppress the votes of voters, which is prohibited by US federal law.

Senator Richard Blumenthal, who introduced a bill in the Senate to regulate AI, hopes that the incident will draw public attention to the threats of disinformation based on dipfakes.

"I hope that the Biden deepfake, or imitation, will actually be a shock to the system and perhaps alert everyone that in fact everyone is at risk" he said.

New Hampshire prosecutors called the robocall an apparent "illegal attempt" to prevent voters from casting their ballots for Biden in the Democratic primary. However, they could not name the origin of the audio recording.

Dipfakes have not previously been used to interfere with US election processes, which is not the case with robocalls. According to New York University's Mekela Panditharatne, they have historically been used by cheaters to spread false information about how, when and where to vote.

"Voice-generation AI potentially makes that method of attempted vote suppression more attractive to fraudsters" she added.

Source: NBC