– I am very proud of my son. (phone ringing) – [Joaquin] Hello, I'm Joaquin Oliver. Six years ago I was a senior at Parkland. – Joaquin is making a difference. – [Joaquin] Many students
and teachers were murdered on Valentine's Day that year
by a person using an AR-15. – [Joanna] Joaquin Oliver,
that voice you just heard on the phone was one of them. – [Joaquin] My body was
destroyed by a weapon of war. I'm back today because my parents used AI to recreate my voice to call you. – [Joanna] In February 2018, the 17-year-old went to
school and never came home. Ever since, his parents have been fighting for stricter gun control. – We are calling for a nationwide strike of American students. – [Joanna] Their latest effort? Resurrecting his voice
and the voice of others. – [Uzi] Hi, this is Uzi Garcia. I'm a fourth grader at
Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, or at least I was.
– [Ethan] Hi, this is Ethan Song. I was killed by an unsecured
gun at my friend's house. – At theshotline.org, you can have the AI voice clones or audio deepfakes of various
kids killed by gun violence place calls to your elected officials. – Artificial intelligence is
becoming a good friend of us. – This all may seem pretty weird to you, like an episode of "Black Mirror." It did to me too. So I had to find out how this tech is giving voice to the dead and what that means for the living. – [Joaquin] But you don't
care. You never did. It's been six years and
you've done nothing. – What's amazing about Joaquin's AI voice is how little audio was
needed to create it.
Take me through that first
time you hear this voice. – It was exactly like him,
and it was so impactful and it was so deep that I wanted more. – It felt like he was still here. – Oh my God, 100%. – [Joanna] Joaquin's voice was created using an AI voice
generator from ElevenLabs. You upload existing audio files and then the machine learning models create an artificial voice
that can sound quite similar to the original. Type in the text of the message and the voice says it.
– [Joaquin] Hello, I'm Joaquin Oliver. – [Joanna] To make this, all
you need is a few seconds of someone's voice without
much background noise. Not a problem when you're alive and can grab your phone to record, but… – We have to collect every single audio because not all the
time you can listen well because maybe the music is behind or maybe there's noisy because they were talking a lot of them. – Ready? no Check the video. – [Joanna] Finally, Manny
found a short clip that worked. – It's the first time outside in days. As you can see, no serious flooding. Oh, look at the tree. – [Joanna] And the Olivers,
which started an organization called Change the Ref to fight
for stronger gun protection wanted him to speak to those they feel bear some
responsibility for his death. – We have been in offices from senators, members of Congress. We have been ignored.
Let's bring another voice. – The voices of the dead. – The voices of the murdered. – But as we've seen with
deepfake audio clones of dead celebrities, the eerie thing here is that you can put any
words into someone's mouth. When you recreate someone's voice, you can create that voice, but you don't know what they
would actually say right now.
– Oh, we know.
– How do you know? – I'll tell you why I know. Do you have a best friend?
– I do. – Like a friend that
you look at her or him and you know exactly what
she or he are thinking, and you don't need to say anything? You got it. That's Joaquin and me. But not only that, keep
in mind that our son was 17 years old, a very
vocal, into social media, communicating the whole
time loud and clear. We're not pulling out phrases or statements that
wouldn't belong to Joaquin. – Manny and Patricia said they drew on Joaquin's previous social media posts when writing the message. When you combine these new AI tools with someone's digital trail, you can create a digital legacy that would've seemed unimaginable
even a few years ago.
It's powerful. But it can also seem… There are some that will
say, "This is creepy bringing back a voice
of a child who died." – It is, I mean, of course, it's creepy. Not worse than a
19-year-old holding an AR-15 inside a school. That's way creepier than that. This is a United States problem, and we have not been able to fix it. If we need to use creepy stuff
to fix it, welcome to creepy. – New AI tools have stunned us, but they also strike fear in us that they could be
inevitably used for evil. What if Joaquin's voice was used to spread misinformation or hate speech? – See, you have to take the
risk. We have to take the risk. – You will see other families'
loved ones' voices too. So this is done in a very responsible way. Like we want this to happen.
We want this voice out there.
I mean, we are sad and
miserable most of the time, but sometimes you want like
a small victory and keep it, and this is a small victory. – [Joanna] All of the messages
for the campaign state that the voices were created with AI. The rise of new generative
AI tools like ChatGPT and ElevenLabs make it
more accessible for anyone to create a bot of their dead loved one. But that's not the intent
with Joaquin's voice here. – I don't wanna recreate Joaquin. That technology will keep
increasing and bringing more and more things to life that maybe they can recreate
Joaquin exactly the way it is. I don't want that. That's
not gonna bring Joaquin back. That's not true. That's a fantasy. – Instead, the goal is
to use the technology to build support for a cause and to help a 17-year-old
boy who had a dream that he never got to fulfill. – He randomly out of nowhere, asked me, "Papi, how do you wanna be remembered?" So I asked him back, "How
do you wanna be remembered?" He said, "I wanna be
remembered big, like Lennon, like Mandela, like Ali." We can let more people know about Joaquin because of technology.
We can reach more and more people. – [Joanna] And yes, the tech
also had another benefit. – That was more a moment of wow, I got a chance to listen
to his voice again, will say that it filled my heart voices and it brought me a smile. – [Joaquin] Act now, we'll
find someone who will..