A longtime Democratic political operative has admitted he commissioned a robocall which featured an AI-created imitation of Joe Biden discouraging voters from participating in the New Hampshire presidential primary.
In a statement, Steve Kramer said he resorted to “easy-to-use online technology” to mimic the president’s voice and send out the infamous automated call to 5,000 Democrats who were most likely to vote in the 23 January primary.
The robocall remains the subject of a law enforcement investigation. The US government has since outlawed automated calls using AI-generated voices, saying they are a threat to democracy.
“With a mere $500 investment, anyone could replicate my intentional call,” Kramer’s statement – provided to NBC News on Sunday and the Guardian on Monday – also said. “Immediate action is needed across all regulatory bodies and platforms.”
Kramer’s statement stopped short of saying that he had permission from his client at the time of the robocall: the long-shot Democratic presidential candidate Dean Phillips. The Minnesota congressman’s campaign has accused Kramer of commissioning the robocall without permission, and has said it would not work with the operative again after paying him nearly $260,000 in December and January.
Additionally, Kramer’s statement avoided addressing a version of events relayed by a magician and hypnotist from New Orleans who says he was paid $150 to create the audio used in the robocall.
The magician, Paul David Carpenter, said that he had long experimented with social media content creation and generative AI on his beat-up laptop in his free time. He said an acquaintance introduced him to Kramer, who took an interest in Carpenter’s AI work and asked him to imitate certain people’s voices.
The audio he created incorporated the president’s oft-used “what a bunch of malarkey” phrase, and it encouraged Democratic voters to skip the New Hampshire primary.
Carpenter said it cost him $1 and took less than 20 minutes to manufacture the audio with software from ElevenLabs, an AI firm that touts its ability to create a voice clone from existing speech samples.
Screenshots that Carpenter provided to the Guardian as well as other media outlets appear to show Kramer texted him three days before the New Hampshire primary to say he had emailed him a script.
Transaction information from the mobile payment service Venmo also appears to show that an account under the same name as Kramer’s father paid Carpenter $150 on 20 January, three days before the primary.
After news of the fake Biden automated call soon broke, texts provided by Carpenter show Kramer sent him a link to an article about the robocall along with the message: “Shhhhhhh.”
Carpenter described phoning Kramer in a panic, and he supplied call logs to establish how often they spoke. Carpenter accused Kramer of brushing off his concerns and telling him to just “delete all your emails and just act like it never happened”.
The New Orleans-based Carpenter said the intensifying law enforcement investigations into the robocall prompted him to speak out publicly about his role in the affair.
He said he was prepared for his background to be picked over. On social media, Carpenter has boosted extreme views, including – but not limited to – vaccine skepticism as well as a 2016 video in which he is seen with a swastika on his forehead and Black face in separate scenes, symbols of racism and violent white supremacy.
Carpenter said he denounced white supremacy in the same video. In the clip, he says he shot the video how he did to catch people’s attention as he implores them to “love, give and grow – stop abusing each other, stop hurting each other, stop killing each other”.
Carpenter expressed regret over how he said Kramer had used his work ahead of the New Hampshire primary.
“Nobody wants to become well-known for something shitty,” said Carpenter, who as a magician previously set world records for fastest straitjacket escape and most fork bends in under a minute. “I’ve worked my entire life to try to be known for being an artist, not for … robocalls that are asking for people to fucking not vote. Like what?”
But he said he believed it would take many people mere minutes to watch a YouTube video and learn how to make voice imitations like the one used in the robocall commissioned by Kramer.
“Pandora’s box is opened,” Carpenter said.