Greetings from Mayor Adams, generated by AI, in different languages

NEW YORK — Mayor Eric Adams doesn’t speak Spanish — or does he?

New Yorkers are getting robocalls from Mayor Eric Adams speaking Mandarin, Urdu or Yiddish, even though he doesn’t actually speak those languages. City Hall is using voice cloning artificial intelligence to create audio public service announcements that sound just like him.

“People stop me on the street all the time, they say ‘I don’t know you speak Mandarin,’” Adams said Monday.

“Conversational AI is amazing, once you put the script in, you can put in any language you want with my voice,” Adams continued.

The calls do not include a disclaimer that they were created with generative AI. But Adams waved off concerns that he could be misleading New Yorkers about his language prowess.

“These are part of the broader conversations that the philosophical people will have to sit down and figure out, ‘Is this ethically right or wrong?’ I’ve got one thing: I’ve got to run the city,” he said. “And I have to be able to speak to people in languages that they understand and I’m happy to do so.”

Adams said the phone calls so far have been inviting New Yorkers to hiring halls to help fill the high number of vacant city jobs.

City Hall didn’t immediately respond to a request for more information about how the AI messages would be used.

Assemblymember Clyde Vanel (D-Queens) has introduced a bill that would require disclosures when AI technology like that is used in political ads. But the fear there is that a candidate could put words in a political opponent's mouth. This case, of an elected official using AI to clone his own voice to reach non-English speaking communities, isn’t something Vanel had considered yet, he told POLITICO.

“All of these questions were still wrestling with,” Vanel said. “Elections, that’s clear. But how do you figure out the wider conversations around how we use it?”

Adams has embraced technology as mayor, taking steps to legalize commercial drone flights and expanding the use of four-legged robots called digidogs.

The mayor mentioned the calls in other languages as an aside during a Monday announcement for the city’s new Artificial Intelligence Action Plan guiding the city’s use of the technology. The city is also launching an AI chatbot on the Department of Small Business Services website that can answer questions about city regulations and more for small business owners.

That chatbot interface was created by Microsoft through their partnership with OpenAI, Chief Technology Officer Matt Fraser said. Microsoft also has a tool, VALL-E X, that can take somebody’s voice, and create audio of them speaking a different language.

“We don’t want the fear of the abuse to get in the way of the proper use,” Adams said. “We were able to send out calls in Yiddish in my voice telling people about job placements. We were using the tool properly.”