Mayor Eric Adams is speaking your language — sort of.
Hizzoner has been passing himself off to New Yorkers as multilingual by using artificial intelligence to appear to speak dozens of languages — from Yiddish to Mandarin — in a series of deepfake robocalls, Adams admitted Monday.
“We have started doing, which I am really excited about, we have started doing robocalls with my voice in many different languages,” Adams boasted from the City Hall Rotunda.
“Conversational AI is amazing,” he said. “Once you put the script in, you could put it in any language you want, with my voice.”
“People stop me in the street all the of the time and say, ‘I didn’t know you speak Mandarin,’” the mayor added.
The confusion may be due to the fact that calls don’t let New Yorkers know that the mayor isn’t actually speaking the language and that his voice is copied through AI and made to artificially speak phrases in a number of languages.
Surveillance Technology Oversight Project executive director Albert Fox Cahn slammed the practice as “deeply unethical.”
“Using AI to convince New Yorkers that he speaks languages that he doesn’t is deeply Orwellian,” Cahn said. “Yes, we need announcements in all of New Yorkers’ native languages, but the deepfakes are just a creepy vanity project.”
It was unclear what the mayor says on the calls or how many have been made to New Yorkers.
In one instance, the mayor said his administration used the tech to communicate with the city’s Jewish population.
“When we were able to send our calls in Yiddish in my voice telling people about job placements, we were using the tool properly and we want to always monitor that,” Adams said, adding, “but this is some amazing technology that we need to wrap our heads around and not be afraid of.”
The price tag for the deepfakes was also not immediately known.
Former Mayor Bill de Blasio famously took lessons to connect with Spanish speakers in the city and would deliver remarks at press conferences en español — a practice that Adams mocked on the trail.
Former Mayor Mike Bloomberg got mocked so thoroughly for his awkward attempts to speak Spanish at press conferences that a “Miguel Bloombito” parody on the X website became a sensation. He got so frustrated at the jokes at his expense, he once told people who didn’t like his Spanish to “just get a life.”
Adams only speaks English.
City Hall did not immediately respond for comment on the robocalls.
The previously unknown practice emerged Monday morning during the rollout of MyCity Chatbot, an AI-driven helper to make it easier for Big Apple businesses to access info from the city’s hundreds of websites.
“We’re using different languages to speak directly to the diversity of New Yorkers and this is going to do the same thing,” the mayor said in response to a Post reporter who asked why the bot only served English-speakers.
The pilot program is expected to add more languages down the line as it aims to streamline the often cumbersome research process for permits, licenses, codes and regulations for business owners.
Adams, who has pushed the adoption of robots and other emerging tech during his time in office, heralded the new AI as “a once-in-a-generation opportunity.”
“We know the term AI can cause anxiety. People think all of a sudden you want to have a ‘Terminator’-type thing to come in and take over the web and displace human beings,” Adams said, adding, “That’s just not reality.”
“Take a deep breath, get a grip. It is going to help us function better in the city.”
The bot utilizes Microsoft’s Azure AI services, which created a specialized service for government agencies back in June, to scrap more than 2,000 of the city’s business sites for information.
Along with the bot on Monday, city officials unveiled their multi-year plan for AI in the Big Apple to expand to other city agencies.