Thomas Gaulkin
On December 17, 2023, a political event like no other caught the world by surprise. In the final minutes of a four-hour-long virtual rally ahead of Pakistan’s national elections, millions of supporters of the political party Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (“Pakistan Movement for Justice,” commonly known as “PTI”) waited expectantly for a message from the party’s founder, former Pakistan prime minister Imran Khan.
But there was a surprise: The Imran Khan who addressed them was not actually Imran Khan. It was an AI clone of his voice, generated by a $99 software app, coordinated by a PTI volunteer sitting thousands of miles away in Chicago.
Khan, a hall-of-fame cricket player turned politician, served as Pakistan’s prime minister from August 2018 until his April 2022 ouster from parliament and has been jailed since August 2023 on various controversial charges. Despite restrictions imposed on Khan and his party’s activities, both remain immensely popular throughout Pakistan and among Pakistani citizens living abroad. To reach those supporters as the February 8 election approached, PTI’s social media team organized the rally to get around the obstructions. Led by the party’s social media lead, Jibran Ilyas, the volunteer team got Khan’s approval to train an AI neural network on his voice and produce the simulated speech.
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