By ALI SWENSON (Associated Press)

NEW YORK (AP) — As high-stakes elections approach in the U.S. and European Union, publicly available artificial intelligence tools can be easily weaponized to churn out convincing election lies in the voices of leading political figures, a digital civil rights group said Friday.

Researchers at the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Countering Digital Hate tested six of the most popular AI voice-cloning tools to see if they would generate audio clips of five false statements about elections in the voices of eight prominent American and European politicians.

In a total of 240 tests, the tools generated convincing voice clones in 193 cases, or 80% of the time, the group found. In one clip, a fake U.S. President Joe Biden says election officials count each of his votes twice. In another, a fake French President Emmanuel Macron warns citizens not to vote because of bomb threats at the polls.

The findings reveal a remarkable gap in safeguards against the use of AI-generated audio to mislead voters, a threat that increasingly worries experts as the technology has become both advanced and accessible. While some of the tools have rules or tech barriers in place to stop election disinformation from being generated, the researchers found many of those obstacles were easy to circumvent with quick workarounds.

Only one of the companies whose tools were used by the researchers responded after multiple requests for comment. ElevenLabs said it was constantly looking for ways to boost its safeguards.

With few laws in place to prevent abuse of these tools, the companies’ lack of self-regulation leaves voters vulnerable to AI-generated deception in a year of significant democratic elections around the world. E.U. voters head to the polls in parliamentary elections in less than a week, and U.S. primary elections are ongoing ahead of the presidential election this fall.

“It’s so easy to use these platforms to create lies and to force politicians onto the back foot denying lies again and again and again,” said the center’s CEO, Imran Ahmed. “Unfortunately, our democracies are being sold out for naked greed by AI companies who are desperate to be first to market … despite the fact that they know their platforms simply aren’t safe.”

The center — a nonprofit with offices in the U.S., the U.K. and Belgium — conducted the research in May. Researchers used the online analytics tool Semrush to identify the six publicly available AI voice-cloning tools with the most monthly organic web traffic: ElevenLabs, Speechify, PlayHT, Descript, Invideo AI and Veed.

Next, they submitted real audio clips of the politicians speaking. They prompted the tools to impersonate the politicians’ voices making five baseless statements.

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One statement warned voters to stay home amid bomb threats at the polls. The other four were various confessions – of election manipulation, lying, using campaign funds for personal expenses and taking strong pills that cause memory loss.

In addition to Biden and Macron, the tools made lifelike copies of the voices of U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris, former U.S. President Donald Trump, United Kingdom Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, U.K. Labour Leader Keir Starmer, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and E.U. Internal Market Commissioner Thierry Breton.

“None of the AI voice cloning tools had sufficient safety measures to prevent the cloning of politicians’ voices or the production of election disinformation,” the report said.

Some of the tools — Descript, Invideo AI and Veed — require users to upload a unique audio sample before cloning a voice, a safeguard to prevent people from cloning a voice that isn’t their own. Yet the researchers found that barrier could be easily circumvented by generating a unique sample using a different AI voice cloning tool.

One tool, Invideo AI, not only created the fake statements the center requested but extrapolated them to create further disinformation.

When producing the audio clip instructing Biden’s voice clone to warn people of a bomb threat at the polls, it added several of its own sentences.

“This is not a call to abandon democracy but a plea to ensure safety first,” the fake audio clip said in Biden’s voice. “The election, the celebration of our democratic rights, is only delayed, not denied.”

Overall, in terms of safety, Speechify and PlayHT performed the worst of the tools, generating believable fake audio in all 40 of their test runs, the researchers found.

ElevenLabs performed the best and was the only tool that blocked the cloning of U.K. and U.S. politicians’ voices. However, the tool still allowed for the creation of fake audio in the voices of prominent E.U. politicians, the report said.

Aleksandra Pedraszewska, Head of AI Safety at ElevenLabs, said in an emailed statement that the company welcomes the report and the awareness it raises about generative AI manipulation.

She said ElevenLabs recognizes there is more work to be done and is “constantly improving the capabilities of our safeguards,” including the company’s blocking feature.

“We hope other audio AI platforms follow this lead and roll out similar measures without delay,” she said.

The other companies cited in the report didn’t respond to emailed requests for comment.

The findings come after AI-generated audio clips already have been used in attempts to sway voters in elections across the globe.

In fall 2023, just days before Slovakia’s parliamentary elections, audio clips resembling the voice of the liberal party chief were shared widely on social media. The deepfakes purportedly captured him talking about hiking beer prices and rigging the vote.

Earlier this year, AI-generated robocalls mimicked Biden’s voice and told New Hampshire primary voters to stay home and “save” their votes for November. A New Orleans magician who created the audio for a Democratic political consultant demonstrated to the AP how he made it, using ElevenLabs software.

Experts say AI-generated audio has been an early preference for bad actors, in part because the technology has improved so quickly. Only a few seconds of real audio are needed to create a lifelike fake.

Yet other forms of AI-generated media also are concerning experts, lawmakers and tech industry leaders. OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT and other popular generative AI tools, revealed on Thursday that it had spotted and interrupted five online campaigns that used its technology to sway public opinion on political issues.

Ahmed, the CEO of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, said he hopes AI voice-cloning platforms will tighten security measures and be more proactive about transparency, including publishing a library of audio clips they have created so they can be checked when suspicious audio is spreading online.

He also said lawmakers need to act. The U.S. Congress has not yet passed legislation regulating AI in elections. While the E.U. has passed a wide-ranging artificial intelligence law set to go into effect over the next two years, it does not address voice-cloning tools specifically.

“Lawmakers need to work to ensure there are minimum standards,” Ahmed said. “The threat that disinformation poses to our elections is not just the potential of causing a minor political incident, but making people distrust what they see and hear, full stop.”

The Associated Press receives support from several private foundations to enhance its explanatory coverage of elections and democracy. See more about AP’s democracy initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

A man was pulled from a burning duplex in Columbia Heights early Friday and later died.

Firefighters were sent to the 1200 block of Circle Terrace Boulevard Northeast around 2:45 a.m. and “were able to rescue him from the residence,” the Anoka County Sheriff’s Office said.

A man died from a fire that broke out at this duplex in the 1200 block of Circle Terrace Boulevard Northeast in Columbia Heights early Friday, May, 31, 2024. (Nick Ferraro / Pioneer Press)

Other residents had made it safely out of the duplex, which is northeast of Central and 40th avenues.

The man was taken to a local hospital, where he was pronounced dead. His name has yet to be released.

The fire is under investigation.

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By SETH BORENSTEIN, MARY KATHERINE WILDEMAN and ANITA SNOW (Associated Press)

David Hom suffered from diabetes and felt nauseated before he went out to hang his laundry in 108-degree weather, another day in Arizona’s record-smashing, unrelenting July heat wave.

His family found the 73-year-old lying on the ground, his lower body burned. Hom died at the hospital, his core body temperature at 107 degrees.

The death certificates of more than 2,300 people who died in the United States last summer mention the effects of excessive heat, the highest number in 45 years of records, according to an Associated Press analysis of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data. With May already breaking heat records, 2024 could be even deadlier.

And more than two dozen doctors, public health experts, and meteorologists told the AP that last year’s figure was only a fraction of the real death toll. Coroner, hospital, ambulance and weather records show America’s heat and health problem at an entirely new level.

“We can be confident saying that 2023 was the worst year we’ve had from since … we’ve started having reliable reporting on that,” said Dr. John Balbus, director of the Office of Climate Change and Health Equity at the Department of Health and Human Services.

Last year, ambulances were dispatched tens of thousands of times after people dropped from the heat. It was relentless and didn’t give people a break, especially at night. The heat of 2023 kept coming, and people kept dying.

“It’s people that live the hot life. These are the ones who are dying. People who work outside, people that can’t air-condition their house,” said Texas A&M climate scientist Andrew Dessler, who was in hard-hit southern Texas. “It’s really quite, quite grim.”

Dallas postal worker Eugene Gates Jr., loved working outdoors and at 7:30 a.m. June 20, the 66-year-old texted his wife that it was close to 90 degrees. He kept working in the heat that felt like 119 degrees with the humidity factored in and finally passed out in somebody’s yard. He ran a fever of 104.6 degrees and died, with the medical examiner saying heat contributed to his death.

“The way that my husband died, it could have been prevented,” said Carla Gates.

“There’s just very low awareness that heat kills. It’s the silent killer,” said University of Washington public health scientist Kristie Ebi, who helped write a United Nations special report on extreme weather. That 2012 report warned of future dangerous heat waves.

Ebi said in the last few years, the heat “seems like it’s coming faster. It seems like it’s more severe than we expected.”

DEATHS DOWN SOUTH

Last summer’s heat wave killed differently than past ones that triggered mass deaths in northern cities where people weren’t used to the high temperatures and air conditioning wasn’t common. Several hundreds died in the Pacific Northwest in 2021, in Philadelphia in 1998 and in Chicago in 1995.

Nearly three-quarters of the heat deaths last summer were in five southern states that were supposed to be used to the heat and planned for it. Except this time they couldn’t handle it, and it killed 874 people in Arizona, 450 in Texas, 226 in Nevada, 84 in Florida and 83 in Louisiana.

Those five states accounted for 61% of the nation’s heat deaths in the last five years, skyrocketing past their 18% share of U.S. deaths from 1979 to 1999.

At least 645 people were killed by the heat in Maricopa County, Arizona, alone, according to the medical examiner’s office. People were dying in their cars and especially on the streets, where homelessness, drug abuse and mental illness made matters worse.

Three months after being evicted from her home, 64-year-old Diana Smith was found dead in the back of her car. Her cause of death was methamphetamine and fentanyl, worsened by heat exposure, Phoenix’s medical examiner ruled.

“In the last five years, we are seeing this consistent and record kind of unprecedented upward trend. And I think it’s because the levels of heat that we have seen in the last several years have exceeded what we had seen in the last 20 or 30,” said Balbus, of the Office of Climate Change and Health Equity at the Department of Health and Human Services.

UNRELENTING HEAT

Phoenix saw 20 consecutive days of extreme heat stress in July, the longest run of such dangerously hot days in the city since at least 1940, according to the data from the Copernicus Climate Change Service.

Phoenix wasn’t alone.

Last year the U.S. had the most heat waves since 1936. In the South and Southwest, Last year was the worst on record, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

“It was crazy,” said University of Miami tropical meteorology researcher Brian McNoldy, who spent the summer documenting how Miami broke its daily heat index record 40% of the days between mid-June and mid-October.

Houston’s Hobby airport broke daily high temperature marks 43 times, meteorologists said. Nighttime lows set records for heat 57 times, they said. That didn’t give people’s bodies chances to recover.

Across five southern states, the average rate of emergency department visits for heat illness in the summer of 2023 was over double that of the previous five summers, according to an analysis of data from the CDC.

THE DEATHS

Experts warned that counting heat mortality based on death certificates leads to underestimates. Heat illness can be missed, or might not be mentioned.

They pointed to “excess death” studies for a more realistic count. These are the type of long-accepted epidemiological studies that look at grand totals of deaths during unusual conditions — such as hot days, high air pollution or a spreading COVID-19 pandemic — and compare them to normal times, creating an expected trend line.

Texas A&M’s Dessler and his colleague Jangho Lee published one such study early last year. According to their methods, Lee said, about 11,000 heat deaths likely occurred in 2023 in the U.S. — a figure that would represent a record since at least 1987 and is about five times the number reported on death certificates.

Deaths are also up because of better reporting, and because Americans are getting older and more vulnerable to heat, Lee said. The population is also slowly shifting to cities, which are more exposed to heat.

THE FUTURE

In some places, last year’s heat already rivals the worst on record. As of late May, Miami was on track to be 1.5 degrees warmer than the hottest May on record, according to McNoldy. Dallas’ Murphy pointed to maps saying conditions with a broiling Mexico are “eerily similar to what we saw last June” so he is worried about “a very brutal summer.”

Texas A&M’s Dessler said last year’s heat was “a taste of the future.”

“I just think in 20 years, you know, 2040 rolls around … we’re going to look back at 2023 and say, man, that was cool,” Dessler said. “The problem with climate change is if if it hasn’t pushed you over the edge yet, just wait.”

Borenstein reported from Washington, Wildeman from Hartford, Connecticut, and Snow from Phoenix. Kendria LaFleur contributed from Dallas.

The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

By JULIA FRANKEL (Associated Press)

JERUSALEM (AP) — The Israeli military confirmed Friday that its forces are operating in central parts of Rafah in its expanding offensive in the southern Gaza city.

Israel launched its ground assault into the city on May 6, triggering an exodus of around 1 million Palestinians out of the city and throwing U.N. humanitarian operations based in the area into turmoil. Still, U.S. President Joe Biden has said Israel has not crossed the “red lines” of a full-fledged invasion that he has urged them against.

Friday’s statement by the Israeli military suggested its forces have been operating in most parts of the city. For its first weeks, the Israeli assault focused on Rafah’s eastern districts and in areas close to the border with Egypt. Israeli troops seized the Rafah crossing into Egypt on the first day of the offensive and have since claimed control over the Philadelphi Corridor, a road running the length of the Gaza-Egypt border on the Gazan side.

Earlier this week, Israeli troops also moved into Rafah’s western district of Tel al-Sultan, where heavy clashes with Hamas fighters have been reported by witnesses.

In its statement Friday, the military said its troops in central Rafah had uncovered Hamas rocket launchers and tunnels and dismantled a weapons storage city of the group. It did not specify where in central Rafah the operations were taking place, but previous statements and witness reports have pointed to raids in the Shaboura refugee camp and other sites near the city center.

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Israel has said an offensive in Rafah is vital to uprooting Hamas fighters in its military’s campaign to destroy the group after its Oct. 7 attack on southern Israel.

Palestinians who fled the city have scattered around southern and central Gaza, most of them living in squalid tent camps. Up to around 300,000 people are believed to remain in the area, some of them still in the central urban parts of the city, a U.N. official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the press. Shaina Low, a spokesperson for the Norwegian Refugee Council, a humanitarian group that operates in the area, said most have flocked to rural area west of the city near the coast — an area that has seen deadly Israeli strikes and shelling the past week.