“Protect us from its peril”: Biden urges Congress to ban AI voice impersonation following fake robocall campaign

On Thursday evening, March 7, President Biden alluded to a growing problem in the tech and entertainment sectors in his State of the Union speech. He demanded that artificial intelligence-powered vocal impersonations be outlawed.

Variety reported that as part of the administration's agenda items, towards the end of his over-an-hour speech, Biden stated,

“Ban AI voice impersonations."

As per the same source, addressing the AI issue and starting to enumerate some recommendations that he intends to pursue if he is granted a second term, Joe said,

“Here at home, I have signed over 400 bipartisan bills. There’s more to pass my unity agenda. Strengthen penalties on fentanyl trafficking, pass bipartisan privacy legislation to protect our children online, harness the promise of AI to protect us from peril, ban AI voice impersonations and more.”

The president had further urged Congress to "harness the promise of AI and protect us from its peril" and to enact privacy laws to protect children's online privacy further. He also said that these actions were part of his Unity Agenda.

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Joe Biden talked about stopping the AI voice impersonation and urged the Congress to do the same

During US President Joe Biden's State of the Union speech on Thursday, March 7, artificial intelligence was briefly addressed when he urged Congress to outlaw voice impersonations produced by the technology.

In January, when a robocalling operation developed a cloned voice of President Biden during the New Hampshire primary, contacting the voters and advising them to "save their votes" for the November presidential election, the President became the target of an AI voice impersonation fraud.

Therefore, the current US President Joe had urged Congress to use AI and all the deep fake calls, according to sources like Bank Info Security.

He even pleaded with the lawmakers to outlaw companies that target minors and to stop big digital companies from gathering personal information on kids and teenagers.

According to Digiday, Biden also said,

"We face a genuine inflection point in history, one of those moments where the decisions we make in the very near term are going to set the course for the next decades. There's no greater change that I can think of in my life than AI presents."

On the other hand, as per Variety, the president did not go into detail about the kinds of regulations or fines he intended to impose on the burgeoning technology or whether they would apply to the entertainment sector.

Furthermore, Biden wasn't alone when he called for the outlawing of voice mimicry on Thursday, March 7. During the New Hampshire primary, robocalls imitating Joe Biden's voice and urging voters to stay home gave Americans a preview of what it would look like.

As per sources like Next Gov, in late February, a Democratic consultant supporting a long-shot bidder on the President's candidacy admitted to making the calls and told the reporters that he was doing it to alert them to the danger.

Following the incident, the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, a 1991 law that grants the FCC the ability to control junk calls through a well-established national "Do Not Call" list, was amended by the Federal Communications Commission to make AI-generated voices in robocalls unlawful.

This recent incident made everyone argue over how best to control AI systems.

Moreover, according to a top official at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the organization has been monitoring cyber campaigns using artificial intelligence to sway election results.

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On the other hand, the US President didn’t say anything further regarding the entire incident.