Democratic Congresswoman Now Only Speaks Via AI-Generated Voice After Being Diagnosed With Rare Disease
Democratic Rep. Jennifer Wexton of Virginia is in the final months of a congressional career cut short by a rare disease that will eventually cut short her life as well.
But this week, she released a video in which artificial intelligence allows her to sound the way she did when her political future was an endless road leading onward.
Last year, Wexton, elected to Congress in 2022, announced that she would not be seeking re-election due to her diagnosis with Progressive Supra-nuclear Palsy, type-p (PSP-P), a rare type of Atypical Parkinsonism. Prior to the announcement she sat for an interview with The Washington Post.
In the course of the interview, Wexton spoke to a friend, assuring her friend, “it’s okay.”
Wexton, however, also offered a very different comment.
“It’s not okay. It’s not okay at all … I’m going to die, which isn’t fair,” she said then.
“It’s hard for me to speak in a way that people can understand and that they want to listen to … I hate the way I sound now. I always have to think about slowing down and enunciating,” she said then.
That all changed in a video Wexton posted to X.
Your ears aren’t deceiving you—AI has allowed me to make a new model of my voice like it was before my PSP.
I hope this helps show creative ways we can empower people facing the kinds of health and accessibility challenges I have and demonstrate our abilities don’t define us. pic.twitter.com/ztXDjCgi63
— Rep. Jennifer Wexton (@RepWexton) July 10, 2024
“Your ears aren’t deceiving you—AI has allowed me to make a new model of my voice like it was before my PSP. I hope this helps show creative ways we can empower people facing the kinds of health and accessibility challenges I have and demonstrate our abilities don’t define us,” she posted.
“For those of you who heard me speak before PSP robbed me of my full voice, you may think your ears are deceiving you right now,” Wexton says in the video. “I assure you, they are not.”
Wexton continued: “I’m very pleased to debut my new AI voice today, and share how this remarkable technology has helped empower me to keep living my life, and doing the job I love.”
Wexton said old clips of her speeches were used to create her new “voice.”
“Since I first began using an augmentative and alternative communication – or AAC – device for speeches on the House floor and in committee, I’ve received an outpouring of supportive messages from disability rights advocates about the importance of demonstrating that just because people like me may not be able to use our voices in the same way, doesn’t mean our words are any less ours or any less important to hear,” she explained.
Wexton did note, however, that AI can still be misused.
“AI technology can be a scary new frontier, especially if used in the wrong way by people with malicious intentions and it’s clear that there’s work to be done to properly protect against potential dangers it poses,” she said.
In a written comment to the Post, she added that “it’s scary to think about the bad things that someone with bad intentions could do with this technology.”
“But it can also provide new, unimaginable and life-changing opportunities for Americans with disabilities,” Wexton noted.
Wexton told The Washington Post that “it will never be ‘me,’ but it’s more me than I or anyone around me ever thought we’d hear again.”
Wexton said she limits who on her staff can access the AI tool “because using my voice to say something without my consent could cause real problems.”
Wexton worked with a company called ElevenLabs, which took only a few days to generate the voice model after receiving the files of Wexton’s speeches.
“Our model is able to understand the relations between words and to adjust delivery based on context … to produce lifelike, human-sounding speech,” Sam Sklar, a spokesman for ElevenLabs, said
Wexton’s office pays a subscription fee for the product, McCartney said.
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