The voices of children who died in the Parkland school shooting in 2018 have been brought back to life through the use of AI in a gun control advocate that some find disturbing.
Six years ago, an awful scenario took place at Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, resulting in the loss of 17 lives on Valentine’s Day.
Now, grieving parents who have lost their children in tragic school shootings, such as the one in Parkland, are finding solace in a unique way.
They use portions of their children’s voices, sourced from social media and home videos, to generate AI-powered audio clips that remarkably resemble their deceased loved ones during phone calls.
A new campaign is employing artificial intelligence (AI) technology to recreate the voices of those who lost their lives to gun violence.
The initiative, founded by the non-profit organization of Joaquin Oliver’s parents, Patricia and Manny Oliver, aims to use these AI-generated voices to advocate for changes in the United States’ gun laws.
Joaquin Oliver, a 17-year-old victim of the Parkland shooting, is a central figure in the campaign. In a poignant recording, Joaquin’s voice echoes, expressing the sentiment, ‘I died that day in Parkland. My body was destroyed by a weapon of war.’
His parents, frustrated by the lack of legislative action, explained to the Wall Street Journal that this unconventional approach was born out of desperation.
“This is a United States problem, and we have not been able to fix it,” remarked Manny Oliver, adding, “If we need to use creepy stuff to fix it, welcome to the creepy.”
AI-Generated Voices
Patricia Oliver shared her emotions, expressing that hearing Joaquin’s recreated voice provided a semblance of his continued presence.
The AI-generated voices extend beyond Joaquin to include Uzi Garcia, a fourth-grader killed in a tragic Uvalde shooting in 2022. In his poignant phone call recreation, Uzi recounts the horrifying incident, stating, ‘I’m a fourth-grader at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. Or at least I was when a man with an AR-15 came into my school and killed 18 of my classmates, two teachers, and me.’
The use of AI in this manner raises important moral issues, as the audio clips were created using ElevenLabs, an AI voice generator that has been the subject of debates regarding its role in fraud, scams, and deepfakes.
Brett Cross, Uzi Garcia’s father, emphasized the enduring impact of keeping his son’s memory alive through these AI-generated voices, stating, ‘You’re not truly dead until the last person who remembers you is gone. So for however many years I have left, I’m going to keep introducing him to this world so that he’ll outlast me.’
The campaign comes in the aftermath of the Parkland shooter Nikolas Cruz’s sentencing to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Officially handed 34 consecutive life sentences in 2022, one for each victim of the deadliest high school shooting in US history, Cruz’s sentence faced criticism from several victims’ families who argued that he deserved the death penalty for his heinous crimes.
