New deep fakes are all over the internet -- and you won't believe the new ones Raymond Arroyo has located. The trial has begun of a Democratic political consultant who has admitted to sending artificial intelligence (AI) generated robocalls mimicking President Biden ahead of the 2024 New Hampshire primary. Steve Kramer faces a 6 million fine and more than two dozen criminal charges after he hired a magician to create a deepfake of President Biden urging New Hampshire voters not to participate in the primary. The fines, proposed by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), are the first involving AI technology. Former president Joe Biden speaks on the phone during a National Small Business Week event in the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington, DC, on May 1, 2023, left.

A company that sent deceptive calls to New Hampshire voters using artificial intelligence to mimic Joe Biden's voice agreed on Wednesday to pay a 1m fine and bolster its caller identification and authentication features, US regulators said. Lingo Telecom, the voice service provider that transmitted the robocalls, agreed to the settlement to resolve enforcement action taken by the Federal Communications Commission, which had initially sought a 2m fine. Meanwhile Steve Kramer, a political consultant who orchestrated the calls, still faces a proposed 6m FCC fine as well as state criminal charges. The case is seen by many as an unsettling early example of how AI might be used to influence groups of voters and democracy as a whole. The phone messages were sent to thousands of New Hampshire voters on 21 January.

FOX News' Eben Brown reports that with the use of AI, scammers are fleecing Americans in more sophisticated ways. The Federal Communications Commission on Thursday made AI-generated robocalls mimicking the voices of political candidates to fool voters illegal. With the unanimous adoption of a declaratory ruling that recognizes calls made with AI-generated voices are "artificial" under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA), a 1991 law restricting junk calls that use artificial and prerecorded voice messages, the FCC said it was giving state attorneys general new tools to go after those responsible for voice cloning scams. The decision was announced days after New Hampshire Attorney General John Formella revealed earlier this week that nefarious robocalls with an AI-generated clone of President Biden's voice urging recipients not to participate in the Jan. 23 primaries – and instead save their votes for the November election – had been traced to two Texas companies. Formella vowed potential civil and criminal action at the state and federal level.

The US government on Thursday outlawed robocalls that use voices generated by artificial intelligence, a decision that sends a clear message that exploiting the technology to scam people and mislead voters won't be tolerated. The unanimous ruling by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) targets robocalls made with AI voice-cloning tools under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, a 1991 law restricting junk calls that use artificial and prerecorded voice messages. The announcement comes as New Hampshire authorities are advancing their investigation into AI-generated robocalls that mimicked President Joe Biden's voice to discourage people from voting in the state's first-in-the-nation primary last month. Effective immediately, the regulation empowers the FCC to fine companies that use AI voices in their calls or block the service providers that carry them. It also opens the door for call recipients to file lawsuits and gives state attorneys general a new mechanism to crack down on violators, according to the FCC.

Two companies based in Texas have been linked to a spate of robocalls that used artificial intelligence to mimic President Joe Biden. The audio deepfake was used to urge New Hampshire voters not to participate in the state's presidential primary. New Hampshire Attorney General John Formella said as many as 25,000 of the calls were made to residents of the state in January. Formella says an investigation has linked the source of the robocalls to Texan companies Life Corporation and Lingo Telecom. No charges have yet been filed against either company or Life Corporation's owner, a person named Walter Monk.