Starting today, congresspeople will receive calls from Joaquin Oliver, a teenager advocating for an end to gun violence. But the voice on the line is that of a ghost, as Joaquin died six years ago in the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.

Oliver voice, along with those of five other shooting victims, have been re-created using AI for a campaign called “The Shotline.” Machine learning technology digested real audio recordings of the individuals and constructed new speech in the sounds of their voices.

These are, in effect, consensual deepfakes, permitted by the families of the victims to apply pressure on American policymakers.

“Some might judge me because I’m using artificial intelligence to recreate the voice of my murdered son,” said Manuel Oliver, Joaquin’s father and co-founder of Change the Ref, a nonprofit focused on gun reform. “Let us judge politicians that use their organic intelligence to do nothing to save lives.”

Working in partnership with fellow gun reform organization March for Our Lives and agency MullenLowe, Change the Ref created “The Shotline” as both a platform for sharing the stories of victims and a mechanism for streamlining calls to policymakers. 

Visitors to the platform’s site can listen to the reconstructed voices relate how they were killed, as well as why congresspeople who are unwilling to reform gun violence carry some of the blame. An option to send the recording as a call to one’s local members of Congress is provided.

Joaquin’s call, for example, begins: “Hello, I’m Joaquin Oliver. Six years ago, I was a senior at Parkland. Many students and teachers were murdered on Valentine’s Day that year by a person using an AR-15, but you don’t care. You never did. It’s been six years, and you’ve done nothing, not a thing to stop all the shootings that have happened since.”

Other victims of school shootings are among those whose voices have been recreated, as well as teenagers and young adults killed by other forms of gun violence.

The goal is to grow the inventory of deepfakes by opening submissions to the public. Visitors to the site can fill out a form about their loved one’s story, which will go through a verification process before potentially being selected as a voice to be recreated for the platform.

Change the Ref is launching “The Shotline”—a portmanteau of “shot” and “hotline”—on the sixth anniversary of the Parkland shooting. The nonprofit has organized a rally taking place today outside the U.S. Capitol, where it will demand immediate action on gun reform from both federal and state policymakers.

Change the Ref has a created deepfake Joaquin Oliver before—in a video campaign from 2020 in which the slain teenage railed again inaction of guns.