Domo Arigato While announcing the city’s plan to handle artificial intelligence, New York City’s galaxy-brained mayor bragged that his voice is now being cloned to make robocalls in Mandarin and Yiddish. “People stop me on the street all the time, they say ‘I don’t know you speak Mandarin,'” Adams said at a Monday press conference. “Conversational AI is amazing — once you put the script in, you can put in any language you want, with my voice.” For what it’s worth, the thing Adams is referencing here is AI voice cloning used to make pre-recorded automated messages, not conversational AI, which is used to generate human-like conversations between a person and a machine — but there’s not much use splitting hairs when it comes to this guy’s outrageous antics. As Politico points out, the robocalls, which per the mayor’s commentary seem to have also been translated into Yiddish, Urdu, and possibly Spanish, did not disclose that they were generated with AI voice cloning. To Adams’ mind, at least, those concerns are beside the point. “These are part of the broader conversations that the philosophical people will have to sit down and figure out, ‘Is this ethically right or wrong?’ I’ve got one thing: I’ve got to run the city,” the mayor continued. “And I have to be able to speak to people in languages that they understand and I’m happy to do so.” Programming Note In spite of the weirdness of the multilingual robocalls — and the cop-turned-politician’s strange and seemingly…NYC’s Mayor Using AI to Make Robocalls of Him Speaking Chinese and Yiddish