Voices of people lost to gun violence have been re-created using AI to call for action, now six years to the day after the Parkland shooting that killed 17. . . .
“It’s been six years and you’ve done nothing. Not a thing to stop all the shootings that have happened since,” the message from Oliver, who was 17 when he died in the 2018 Valentine’s Day’s tragedy at Parkland’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school, says.
“I’m back today because my parents used AI to recreate my voice to call you. Other victims like me will be calling too, again and again, to demand action. How many calls will it take for you to care? How many dead voices will you hear before you finally listen?“
Six years ago today, Joaquin Oliver was killed in a hallway outside his Florida classroom, one of 17 students and staff murdered in the worst high school shooting in the US. On Wednesday, lawmakers in Washington DC will hear his voice, recreated by artificial intelligence, in phone calls demanding to know why they’ve done nothing to tackle the plague of gun violence. (The Guardian)
The voices are “trained” by deep machine learning from audio clips supplied by their families. The resulting recordings are ready to be delivered straight to those in Congress with the power to do something about gun violence. Visitors to the website enter their zip code and choose a message to be sent to their elected representative.
That Oliver’s voice is spearheading the campaign, six years to the day of his killing, is deliberate. One of the two groups behind the initiative is March for Our Lives, the activist group formed by the Stoneman Douglas students that ignited a global protest movement after Parkland.