Their son was shot dead. Now his AI voice is calling lawmakers about gun reform

As It Happens6:32Their son was shot dead. Now his AI voice is calling lawmakers about gun reform

If the idea of getting a phone call from a teenager who was killed in a mass shooting makes you uncomfortable, Patricia Oliver says that's the point.

Six years after her son Joaquin Oliver, 17, was gunned down at his Parkland, Fla., high school, a new gun reform campaign is using a recreation of his voice, generated by artificial intelligence, to robocall U.S. politicians.

"The point is to make people in Congress … feel uncomfortable," Oliver told As It Happens host Nil Köksal. "Maybe that makes them move forward."

The campaign — called the Shotline — launched on Valentine's Day to mark the anniversary of the 2018 Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland.  

'I died that day in Parkland'

People can go to the project's website and choose from seven AI recordings of people who were killed by gun violence, and send them to elected U.S. representatives of their choice. 

It's a joint project by March For Life, a student-led gun control advocacy group, and Change the Ref, an organization Joaquin's parents created to defeat politicians who support gun lobbyists and manufacturers.

In Joaquin's message, an AI voice says: "Six years ago, I was a senior at Parkland. Many students and teachers were murdered on Valentine's Day that year by a person using an AR 15. But you don't care. You never did. It's been six years, and you've done nothing. Not a thing to stop all the shootings that have continued to happen since. 

"The thing is, I died that day in Parkland. 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. Other victims like me will be calling too, again and again to demand action. 

"How many calls will it take for you to care? How many dead voices will you hear before you finally listen? Every day your inaction creates more voices. If you fail to act now, we'll find someone who will."

There's also a robocall using the AI-generated voice of Uziyah Garcia, a 10-year-old who was killed in the 2022 elementary school shooting in Uvalde, Texas.

Brett Cross, Uziyah's uncle and caretaker, says the family decided to participate "so that no other child will have to go through what Uzi did. No other parent should have to go through what we have."

There's one of Ethan Song, a 15-year-old who shot himself by accident in 2018 at his best friend's house in Connecticut, while the two played with a handgun that hadn't been locked away. His message pushes for a federal law making it a crime to not properly store guns in homes where children live.

"You would think the stacking up of our dead children's coffins would be enough to create a cultural shift in this country, but sadly our message is really falling on deaf ears," Kristin Song, Ethan's mother, said.

To create the recordings, PR company MullenLowe and AI firm Edisen fed real audio recordings of the victims to the ElevenLabs generative voice AI platform. 

"There's a lot of discussion going on with AI right now, but this is a beautiful example of what it actually can achieve, a very human output," Mirko Lempert, Edisen's AI creative designer, told the Guardian newspaper.

"The project was very emotional and showed how much our worlds are different, because in my country we're not exposed to those kinds of [gun violence] situations that much. It was a wake-up call."

'We do our activism in a different way'

A wake-up call is exactly what Oliver and her husband Manuel are going for. The couple are among the most outspoken of the Parkland parents. 

They have driven through the country on a schoolbus loaded with the loved ones of school shooting victims. They've published a picture book, riddled with bullet holes, called Joaquin's First School Shooting.

Manuel's activism has seen him arrested twice, once in 2022 after he climbed a construction crane near the White House to unfurl a banner demanding U.S. President Joe Biden enact stricter gun laws, and again 2023 for disrupting a U.S. House of Representatives hearing on guns.

"We're going to get criticism for anything we do, because we do our activism in a different way," Oliver said. "I don't want to see people ... grabbing their cell phones because they're bored. I want them to be ...  paying attention to what we're saying."

This also isn't the couple's first time using an AI recreation of their son's likeness. In 2020, they released an AI video of Joaquin urging young voters to choose candidates who support stricter gun laws. At the time, critics accused them of politicizing his death.

"They put words in a dead kid's mouth. If my father did this to me, I would haunt him for the rest of his life," one wrote on YouTube.

But Oliver says that if her son was alive today, he'd be the one out there fighting for stricter gun laws — an issue he was outspoken about on social media and at school. 

"For anyone who doubts about what was Joaquin's position and perspective about gun violence, they can go themselves and check it themselves," his mother said. "I don't need to prove anything."

Joaquin would be 23 today if he had survived the Parkland shooting. She says she remembers when his father asked him how he envisioned his future. 

"He said, 'I want to be big…. I want to be like someone that is well-known for what I'm doing.' I'm telling you that he's doing that,'" she said.

"From Japan to Venezuela, where we are from, he is very powerful. His energy is very active. A lot of people that never knew Joaquin are able to feel it."