San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
AI gives voice to the victims of gun violence
The voices seem ordinary, the sweet but authoritative voices of children on the doorstep of adulthood.
They never reached that stage of their lives. The kids were cut down in a mass shooting on Feb. 14, 2018, at Marjory Stoneman Douglas
High School in Parkland, Fla.
Seventeen lives expunged, dozens more shattered — the lives of their friends and loved ones. Now their voices have returned.
Using the magic of AI, loved ones are lobbying Congress for action on gun control.
“It’s been six years and you’ve done nothing,” the recreated voice of Joaquin Oliver, 17 when he died in the shooting, says. “Not a thing to stop all the shootings that have happened since.”
Other voices from other shootings, also reproduced through AI, have spoken to us before, chilling words condemning chilling acts.
One of them was Uziyah Garcia, a 10-year-old victim of the 2022 Robb Elementary School shooting in Uvalde. His voice, honeyed with the innocence of youth, revived a pain that needs no reviving, for it will always be there, as searing as the day it was born.
“I’m a fourth-grader at Robb Elementary in Uvalde, Texas,” the voice says. “Or at least I was when a man with an AR-15 came into my school.”
It is one thing to reproduce life through art — books, movies, songs — but to reproduce it in assembly-line fashion such as deep fakes, and then to present it as if it were real? That is wrong. It smacks of a dystopian future in which reality and fantasy are indistinguishable.
The current case offers a different perspective, more ambiguous and complicated. The intent is to open minds, not deceive them. It may be an unusual strategy, but the campaign is as well-meaning as it is uncomfortable.
The parents are frustrated, as anguished now as they were
after the shooting. Nothing can bring their children back. But if they can use a piece of them, whether real or manufactured, to make Congress hear what it should have heeded decades before, maybe their deaths can help other kids avoid the same fate.
“We wanted it to be a powerful message,” Patricia Oliver, the mother of the Parkland victim, said.
The campaign was spearheaded by March for Our Lives, the activist group formed by Stoneman Douglas students.
“Joaquin has his own energy, his own image. It keeps him alive,” Oliver said. “I am so proud of Joaquin; he’s the engine that pushes us.”
The Second Amendment protects a treasured right in this country, but it should not — cannot — yield to insanity. Weapons have proliferated beyond the imaginations of the Founding Fathers, and a wellarmed militia no longer consists of citizens armed with muskets. Modern-day weapons are available to almost anyone with the money to buy them, and too often we wield them against ourselves.
“There is no mystery to the Second Amendment,” Dominic Erdozain writes in his book “One Nation Under Guns.” “The mystery is how one part of America convinced itself that privately held guns are the foundation of democracy, and how everyone else was bullied into acquiescence.”
During an NRA rally on Feb. 13 in Harrisburg, Pa., former President Donald Trump spoke proudly of his inaction on gun control. He should have felt shame. There were 1,714 mass shootings during his time in office, resulting in 1,679 deaths and 7,355 injuries, according to
Everytown for Gun Safety, a nonprofit advocacy group.
“We didn’t yield,” he said. What Trump failed to mention is that, as president, he trumpeted his courage after proposing tougher gun measures in the wake of the Parkland shootings. He dropped the suggestions amid a fierce backlash from the NRA.
Courage? Whatever courage he possessed evaporated like the smoke from a gun blast.
If the 17 Marjory Stoneman Douglas victims were alive today, they might be saying what AI is saying for them. The words, though fabricated, are powerful. A testimony from beyond, it is no less eloquent and compelling for its fabrication.
We should listen. The 17 deserve that much. And so do the children — and adults — who will, sadly but inevitably, one day join their ranks.