- NYC Mayor Eric Adams’s office is using AI to clone his voice into languages like Mandarin for robocalls.
- People have even asked him if he speaks Mandarin, Adams said at a press conference on Monday.
- Adams also unveiled a new AI chatbot that he said will help small business owners.
If you’ve been living in New York City for the past year, you may have gotten a surprising call from Mayor Eric Adams speaking to you in Mandarin, Yiddish, or Haitian Creole.
If you thought Adams was fluent in all these languages — think again, it’s actually AI.
The calls are being generated through an AI voice cloning software called Voice Lab, according to the mayor’s office. But they seem to be pretty convincing to anyone who’s received one, Adams said.
“People stop me on the street all the time and they say ‘I didn’t know you speak Mandarin,'” Adams said at a press conference on Monday where he unveiled a new action plan for how New York will utilize AI.
Since March 2022, Adams’ office has reached over 4 million residents through these calls, a spokesperson for the mayor told Insider. During that time it has made 5,000 calls in Spanish, over 250 in Yiddish, over 160 in Mandarin, 89 in Cantonese, and 23 in Haitian Creole, according to his office. The calls have largely been used to alert residents about citywide job fairs known as hiring halls, but they’ve also been used to promote the city’s Rise Up community concerts, an initiative Adams brought back in July.
The goal of the robocall program is to “speak directly to the diversity of New Yorkers,” Adams said at Monday’s conference. Nearly a half of New Yorkers speak a language other than English at home, and almost 25% are not English proficient, according to figures from the NYC Department of City Planning.
To that end, Adams also wants the AI chatbot he unveiled on Monday — a resource for small business owners — to eventually provide answers in the “hundreds of languages that are out there,” he said on Monday.
Some say Adams’ initiatives raise ethical questions around how political leaders should use AI — and how transparent they should be.
“It’s wonderful to make things in as many languages as you can,” Annika Marlen Hinze, a political science professor at Fordham University, told The City. “But it’s a whole other issue to pretend or insinuate that you are speaking all those languages yourself, and I see serious ethical concerns there for a mayor who does not speak multiple languages.” Adams’ office did not comment on the concern or specify how many languages the mayor speaks.
Others say that while the robocalls themselves aren’t concerning, they highlight the fact politicians need to set ground rules for AI use. “We need baseline rules because there are a whole bunch of other far-more nefarious use cases that could come up,” Caitlin Seeley George, campaigns and managing director for Fight For the Future, a nonprofit advocacy group for digital rights, told Insider by email.
New York City also quietly rolled out AI surveillance technology at subway stations to track fare evaders earlier this year.
Adams, however, contends that AI will ultimately just improve the way the city operates.
“We know the term AI can cause anxiety. We hear it all the time. People think all of sudden you’re going to have a terminator figure come in and take over government and displace human beings,” he said on Monday. “Take a deep breath, get a grip, it’s going to help us function better in the city.”
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