Eric Adams's AI Yiddish recording
At the end of last year, New York City Mayor Eric Adams revealed the city had begun using new AI technology to send messages in different languages to its residents after estimates saying between 200 and 800 languages are currently spoken in the city.
The announcement came after many residents reported receiving recorded phone calls from someone claiming to be the mayor but speaking in languages Adams doesn't exactly speak, including Mandarin, Creole and even Yiddish.
"We have started doing, which I am really excited about, we have started doing robocalls with my voice in many different languages,” Adams said, announcing that "we were able to send our calls in Yiddish in my voice telling people about job placements.”
Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, an AI utilization watchdog, criticized the move, saying, "the deepfakes are just a creepy vanity project." The organizations referred to the new system’s cost, amounting to $32,000. "Using AI to convince New Yorkers that he speaks languages that he doesn’t is deeply Orwellian. Yes, we need announcements in all of New Yorkers’ native languages, but the deepfakes are just a creepy vanity project.”
Adams responded to the criticism. "You cannot be afraid of technology because of the abusiveness of it. I hear it throughout my streets in this city, that 'I don't feel that government communicates to me in a language that I speak.' We found a way to properly use artificial intelligence to do that," the mayor said.
"And I walk around sometimes and people turn around and say, 'I just know that voice. That voice is so comforting that I enjoy hearing your voice.' Now they're able to hear my voice in their language," he added.
The New York municipality said the system was developed by the ElevenLabs software company, founded by former Google and Palantir employees. When it comes to Yiddish speakers, estimates say they make up about 10% of the city's residents, or 1.1 million Jews.
Some of Adams's top aides are fluent Yiddish-speaking Orthodox Jews, and he received significant support from Orthodox voting blocs in his 2021 mayoral race. He faced criticism then for the city's failure to communicate with the rapidly growing Orthodox community in the city effectively, which primarily speaks Yiddish as a first language.
Adams specifically criticized the failure of the city to reach Yiddish speakers during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, when some Hasidic communities ignored the city's health guidelines and emergency orders. "We needed to use reliable messengers and collaborate with trusted newspapers, radio, and digital media outlets in Yiddish," he said at the time.
Initially, the city refused to release the recordings to the public, but a threat from local media outlet Hell Gate to file a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit eventually led to the files being released in various languages. In the case of the Yiddish recording, there’s no doubt Adams's voice was used in it, but several Yiddish speakers who heard it said it was an almost unintelligible recording.
"I feel seriously blessed to be a Yiddish speaker at this moment so I can appreciate how absolutely bizarre this AI Yiddish is," one user wrote. Jewish newspaper The Forward, which was initially founded as a Yiddish-language news outlet, posted on its X account: "Eric Adams attempt to say ‘Sholom Aleichem’ in Yiddish goes way off to ‘Shlooom eleikhem…’”