The campaign of Democratic presidential candidate Dean Phillips is distancing itself from a consultant who allegedly commissioned a robocall that used artificial intelligence to impersonate President Joe Biden during the New Hampshire primary election.
NBC News reported Friday that political consultant Steve Kramer paid a New Orleans magician to use AI to impersonate Biden on the robocall in January, according to text messages, call logs and Venmo transactions the creator shared with NBC. Kramer was hired by the Phillips campaign to assist in ballot efforts in New York and Pennsylvania.
In the call, a voice that sounds like the president urges voters not to vote in the January 23 primary and instead to “save” their vote for the November election.
New Hampshire’s attorney general announced earlier this month that the call had been linked to a pair of Texas-based telecommunications companies and said state law enforcement had opened a criminal investigation. Senior US law enforcement officials have also been closely monitoring the incident to determine if a federal crime was committed, a senior US official familiar with the matter told CNN.
Paul Carpenter, a New Orleans-based magician, told NBC News he was hired in January by Kramer to use AI software to make the imitation of Biden’s voice used in the robocall.
“I created the audio used in the robocall. I did not distribute it. I was in a situation where someone offered me some money to do something, and I did it. There was no malicious intent. I didn’t know how it was going to be distributed,” he said to NBC.
When contacted by CNN, Carpenter referred all questions to his attorney, who did not immediately respond.
Kramer referred a request for comment to Hank Sheinkopf, a New York…
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