Last Tuesday, as I was awaiting the start of a local council meeting that I was covering, I received a phone call from an unidentified caller.
Seeing as the number was one of the 1-866 variety, I let it go to voicemail before settling in for the meeting.
After the meeting was over – it was a virtual one – I was able to rush over to my son’s hockey game at the rink. After taking in that tilt against Arran-Elderslie, I finally took my phone out to see what the earlier call was.
“Hello, this is common-sense Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre calling with a special invite…”
Oh, this should be interesting… how the hell did he get this number?
He invited me to come out to his “Axe The Tax” rally in London later in the week.
Why, I am honoured… I think… again, how the hell did he get this number?
It certainly sounded like Poilievre, anyway. It was his robotic-sounding voice – seemingly a characteristic of most federal Conservative leaders (remember the Royal Canadian Air Farce sketches about Stephen Harper, anyone?).
He spoke slowly, clearly – then sped up when reciting the phone number to contact “him” at.
What the heck was that? It’s like he hit the fast-forward button.
The caller identifying himself at Poilievre hit his speaking points next.
“We will talk… about how I will axe the NDP-Trudeau Carbon Tax to bring home lower gas, heat and grocery bills… ban hard drugs and bring home safe streets.
“To find out more, JOIN me on… Thursday… in London at the ‘Axe The Tax’ rally…”
Did the CD in my Sony Walkman just skip? The anti-skip technology never works…
As I listened to the message, something seemed off, but I couldn’t put my finger on it.
I mentioned this to my wife, so I played the message again, this time on speaker phone.
“I get what you mean,” she said. “It almost sounds like it is AI or something.”
That’s it! Or is it?
You see, as I mentioned earlier, it seems like speaking in a monotone, vanilla, robotic voice is a characteristic that all federal Conservative leaders must possess in order to be, well, the robotic overlord of the party.
I’ve listened to that message several times over the past week, trying to determine if it really was Poilievre recording a scripted message inviting me to a rally in London, or if some sort of artificial intelligence software was used to piece the message together.
And I think that is what disturbs me more than the fact that I got an unsolicited call from a political party – that I am seriously doubting that it was actually Poilievre recording that message.
I recently saw a news report from the United States, where a retired judge told government officials about an “incident” that his son was involved in.
In short, the man received a phone call from his “son,” who told him he had been in an accident and injured another driver. The son was in jail and needed bail money.
The judge said the voice on the phone sounded like his son, and said all of the right things. The “son” told him that his nose was broken in the crash, and needed $9,000 for bail. The judge was to contact the son’s public defender to arrange the bail conditions. The judge made the call to the “public defender,” who again said the right things.
The judge, being a forward thinker, messaged his daughter-in-law to ask her to call his son’s employer to let them know he wouldn’t be at work today due to the accident.
Within a few minutes, the judge received a FaceTime call from his son and daughter-in-law. The son was uninjured, not in jail, and ready to go to work.
“Dad, I think you are being scammed,” he told the judge.
The judge told the government officials that he understands there are economic benefits to AI, but it can be a dangerous tool if in the wrong hands.
“I’m a retired judge, and I nearly fell for this scam,” he said. “If they can fool me, they can fool a lot of people.”
That is what concerns me about AI – the ability to take anyone’s voice and create audio clips to say anything you want, based on a small clipping of a person’s actual voice. And if AI can convince a retired judge to nearly send bail money to a scammer, what can it do in a political campaign?
I think the robo-call from Poilievre last week was AI. Aside from the random change in voice pitch, random stops, and the increase in speed reading a telephone number and email, the grammar was far too clean for it to have been written by a speech writer, or read from a script.
It was far too intelligible of language for any politician to use, and didn’t contain enough slandering of the other parties for it to be the real thing.
AI or the robot politician? I guess we’ll never know for sure.
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Mike Wilson is the editor of Midwestern Newspapers. Comments and feedback are welcome at mwilson@midwesternnewspapers.com.
