The FCC wants to make robocalls that use AI-generated voices illegal | Hacker News Reader

The FCC wants to make robocalls that use AI-generated voices illegal

engadget.com

71 pointsthunderbong42 comments

How about we just make robocalls illegal.

If you can’t pay a person to do it, it must not be important enough.

I second that proposal. Or at least make all the FCC decider phone numbers public so I can robocall them until they make it illegal. And WTF does AI have to do with it. A non-AI generated but human or digitally created voice is somehow acceptable? There are plenty of voice actors that sound like Taylor Swift or Joe Biden.

How many of them are willing to commit wire fraud?

If it's wire fraud, then we don't need a new AI-specific law to make it illegal.

It's the difference between charging one fraudster vs charging one fraudster plus one voice impersonator. It's also not clear that current laws against impersonation do cover digitally assisted impersonation.

They’re used in political campaigns. Do I need to say more?

Maybe unsolicited robocalls.

Too bad you forgot to uncheck that box that kept rechecking itself at every step of checkout last time you bought a thing online agreeing that the store and all their business and marketing partners could contact you.

A blanket cutoff is ill advised in my opinion. I think it has to depend on the intent behind the phone call. For instance, I got a robocall from the water department monday saying there is a boil advisory in effect due to high water and sediment runoff due to weather. Having enough people for the once in 10 years where ythey needed that many doesn't seem necessary. And once you get into intent sadly, all bets are off.

Since I and most everybody I know will never answer a call from a number not in their address book as a direct result of robocalls, I'm not sure that this is a huge issue.

If, for instance, my water company called me with such a notice, it's not likely I would actually hear about it that way, because I'd assume it was a robocall. I'd more likely hear about it through other media outlets.

No one you know has kids? People with kids have to take calls, in case it's a facility with something to report, so they can't ignore any calls.

I know several people with kids, and I have kids of my own. They're no longer young enough for this to matter, but even when they were, I still ignored calls. The main difference was that I actually bothered to listen to any voice mails unknown callers left.

There are people that can only be reached with a phone call. The water company has a responsibility to at least try to reach them.

I have never in my live received a robo call, then again I live in the EU. So yet another one of those unsolvable problems that have been solved elsewhere..

That's because it's far from an unsolvable problem. In the US, though, there is big money lobbying that works hard to keep the problem unsolved.

Fine, then the only robocalls that are permitted are for public safety. All others are illegal.

The government and utility companies here usually send letters to notify of issues or planned maintenance.

Do you really want to wait 2 days for a "boil water" notice to make its way through the mail?

Shouldn't that be a text message or email?

Not to dismiss your point, but bring more context to mind

... my city (Austin) addresses this with paper inserts on the door

There are alternatives, presenting your options as the extent feels deliberately shortsighted

at that point, they can send you a text, an email, a letter, ...

robocalls are never necessary

Or regulate them like SMS campaigns. There is such a thing as transactional robocalls.

This reads a bit like an "only in America and the third world" kind of problem.

I never received a robocall in my life (and no spam calls at all after those where made illegal in the EU years ago).

Finally some anti-American sentiment on this website!

Yes, hardworking Americans are exploited in order to power the rest of the world. There, now I've offended everyone on the planet.

I live in a developed country and regularly get robocalls from other countries advising me that I need to urgently contact a bank/the tax department/the Chinese embassy so I don't get thrown in jail. I'm not sure how you can legislate your way out of this, and if you're not getting these in the EU yet, you will soon.

I wouldn’t call Canada that. The amount of spam calls I received there made my phone basically unusable for calls.

Whereas in a developing country I had like 2-3 ad calls/wk and now I get none in EU.

The USA has a huge population of English speakers. This makes robocalls more scalable. It doesn’t cost any more to call cellphones than landlines. Calling some EU country cellphones can cost 0.30 USD/min.

I always figured the most marginal of taxes would make it economically unviable.

If you charged a nickel to complete a call, the Water and Power Department can at worst, slip a $1 fee into a bill to build up a fund to pay for emergency outage calls. (Hopefully, they don't intend to call each customer more than 20 times per month).

But any industry based on spray-and-pray and miniscule take rates will find it too expensive to play.

My child's school robocalls is it school is canceled for to snow, etc.

Paying a bunch of school administrators to call several thousand homes is a waste of money.

what's wrong with a text/whatsapp/email/push notification/messenger/...?

many systems exist where you have to respond yes to acknowledge receipt. They can manually call the 1% that didn't respond.

Robocall technology isn't free either.

So would the Google Assistant feature (and similar tools) that calls places to make reservations be illegal?

Seems like a lousy (lazy) solution to the problem that limits innovative applications of this tech.

The existence of the robocall plague already limits innovative applications of this tech.

But I think it wouldn't be hard to allow room for a service like you describe. You aren't likely to be making hundreds or thousands of such calls a day, after all.

Does that feature actually/still exist?

I remember it being discussed when it was announced but I haven’t heard about it since.

I used it once, it called the restaurant and it didn’t work

If too many people hammer away at live support channels with automated tools, hold times will become very long and businesses will add captchas. Using automation on a synchronous communication channel implies that you think the recipient’s time is less valuable than your own.

I'd rather they ban the transmission of messages by politicians who talk like LLMs.

iOS has a nifty feature that lets you block all calls from numbers not in your contacts.

Yeah, blocking the contractors I’m getting quotes from would suck.

I have a Twilio number that forwards to my real number, and the Twilio number is a contact in my address book. So anyone who gets the special Twilio number (eg, contractors, preschool, etc) can call from whatever number and never be blocked.

This only works if Twilio successfully blocks the spam calls before they are forwarded. I guess I’m not surprised that Twilio does a much better job of it than any of the dinosaur carriers.

Sure, but so far so good. The only "spam" call I get is people trying to get ahold of the previous owner of the phone number, but I find that far less annoying than marketing robo calls.

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