<\/p>\n
Jennifer spent her weekend calling California voters, urging them to cast their ballot in Tuesday\u2019s primary election for Democrat Peter Dixon.<\/p>\n
But unlike her human counterparts, Jennifer is a creation of artificial intelligence (AI), allowing her to make thousands of calls without taking a break or losing her cool.<\/p>\n
\u201cHello there. My name is Jennifer and I\u2019m an artificial intelligence volunteer,\u201d she says, immediately declaring her identity in calls to Silicon Valley voters in the US congressional race.<\/p>\n
In her slightly robotic-sounding voice \u2014 intentionally designed to make it clear she is not human \u2014 she introduces the candidate, asks questions and responds to those she gets from voters, all in a surprisingly natural tone.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m wondering why a person hasn\u2019t called me today,\u201d Dixon\u2019s operations manager Austin Madden asks her during a demonstration call for AFP<\/em>.<\/p>\n \u201cMy apologies if I missed that point earlier,\u201d Jennifer replies without missing a beat.<\/p>\n \u201cThe reason an AI like me is calling instead of a real person is to help the campaign reach more people efficiently, allowing human volunteers to focus on areas where personal interaction is crucial.\u201d Dixon only recently began using Jennifer, the product of start-up Civox.<\/p>\n At first \u201cwe were skeptical,\u201d said Dixon, a Marine veteran and cybersecurity entrepreneur. \u201cAnd so we tested it.\u201d<\/p>\n His staff expected results would be \u201ca mixed bag.\u201d Instead, \u201cPeople were shocked at how good the capability was,\u201d Dixon said from his company\u2019s headquarters in Palo Alto, sitting before a computer screen showing clips from his campaign.<\/p>\n In one of the videos, images alternate between reality (Dixon holding his young daughter) and sequences in which the background (the Afghan war) and his outfit are artificially generated \u2014 and presented as such.<\/p>\n The point, he said, was to \u201cshow that we are comfortable not just understanding these tools, but\u2026 using them in an ethical, responsible and transparent way.\u201d<\/p>\n Stunning progress in AI in the past year and the appearance of generative AI programs like ChatGPT \u2014 which produce text, images and sounds on demand and in everyday language \u2014 have sparked tremendous enthusiasm but also grave concerns about potential risks, including lost jobs, intellectual property theft and fraud.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m terrified about all of that,\u201d Dixon admitted.<\/p>\n But he would rather see the US \u201ccontinue to lead in how we use it, and figure out how to write the rules of the road ourselves, as opposed to having another country like China\u201d doing so.<\/p>\n Ilya Mouzykantskii co-founded Civox partly to sharpen the focus on \u201cthe intersection of artificial intelligence and politics.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWe are already in a future,\u201d he said, where politicians are \u201cusing artificial intelligence tools to develop policy and to make decisions\u201d \u2014 without necessarily announcing that they are doing so.<\/p>\n \u201cMaybe that is the benevolent technocracy that we are hurtling towards,\u201d Mouzykantskii said. \u201cBut we shouldn\u2019t end up there accidentally, and we shouldn\u2019t end up there without consent.\u201d<\/p>\n In the future, said Adam Reis, Civox\u2019s other co-founder, \u201cit\u2019s not going to be the best-funded campaigns necessarily that have an unfair advantage. It\u2019s going to be the ones with the best technology.\u201d<\/p>\n Reis said he had long been working to create AI \u201ccharacters\u201d with whom he could have believable dialogues. The arrival of generative AI made that much easier.<\/p>\n But, he added, \u201cWe\u2019ve discovered that the mechanics of conversations and of speech are actually much, much more difficult than the content of what is said.\u201d To be truly convincing, an AI character needs to speak fluidly, understand and react quickly, and know both when to interrupt and when to allow an interruption \u2014 all difficult challenges.<\/p>\n \u201cSome people try to trick the system,\u201d said Patrick McNally, Civox\u2019s field director. \u201cBut the bot is very good at bringing it back to policy\u2026 sometimes to a point a human wouldn\u2019t even be able to.\u201d<\/p>\n In January, an automated program that called voters using an AI-generated voice of President Joe Biden heightened concerns about massive disinformation enabled by the novel technology in an election year. But that does not affect Jennifer or her counterparts using Civox technology. For they don\u2019t pretend to be something \u2014 or someone \u2014 they aren\u2019t.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Jennifer spent her weekend calling California voters, urging them to cast their ballot in Tuesday\u2019s primary election for Democrat Peter Dixon. But unlike her human counterparts, Jennifer is a creation of artificial intelligence (AI), allowing her to make thousands of calls without taking a break or losing her cool. \u201cHello there. My name is Jennifer […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":67206,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"site-sidebar-layout":"default","site-content-layout":"","ast-site-content-layout":"default","site-content-style":"default","site-sidebar-style":"default","ast-global-header-display":"","ast-banner-title-visibility":"","ast-main-header-display":"","ast-hfb-above-header-display":"","ast-hfb-below-header-display":"","ast-hfb-mobile-header-display":"","site-post-title":"","ast-breadcrumbs-content":"","ast-featured-img":"","footer-sml-layout":"","ast-disable-related-posts":"","theme-transparent-header-meta":"","adv-header-id-meta":"","stick-header-meta":"","header-above-stick-meta":"","header-main-stick-meta":"","header-below-stick-meta":"","astra-migrate-meta-layouts":"default","ast-page-background-enabled":"default","ast-page-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"ast-content-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/i.dawn.com\/large\/2024\/03\/04130550371140b.jpg?r=130807","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[192],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-67205","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-islamabad-news"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pakistaninewspaperlist.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67205","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pakistaninewspaperlist.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pakistaninewspaperlist.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pakistaninewspaperlist.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pakistaninewspaperlist.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=67205"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/pakistaninewspaperlist.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67205\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pakistaninewspaperlist.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/67206"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pakistaninewspaperlist.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=67205"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pakistaninewspaperlist.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=67205"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pakistaninewspaperlist.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=67205"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\u2018People were shocked\u2019<\/h2>\n
\u2018The best technology\u2019<\/h2>\n
\nUS authorities subsequently banned the use of such \u201ccloned\u201d voices, to combat political or commercial fraud.<\/p>\n