“Fake AI voice impersonating Secretary of State Marco Rubio contacts foreign ministers and US officials” was not on my 2025 bingo card. But on second thought, this is one of the least surprising headlines of Trump round two. If someone was trying to juice the odds of this headline appearing, they did a bang-up job.
If you, too, would like to achieve “Fake AI voice impersonating Secretary of State Marco Rubio contacts foreign ministers and US officials” as a headline six months into your presidential administration, here’s what to do.
First, from a security standpoint, elect to forgo all manner of security protocols and classification norms—all while decimating the staffing and funding of cybersecurity agencies—and instead foster a laissez-faire hodgepodge of personal devices and commercial platforms for high-level state communications. You might have to weather a few embarrassing security breaches, such as accidentally inviting a journalist into a top-secret war discussion or enduring a previous case of AI impersonation, but just hold firm and change exactly none of your practices in response. If necessary, deflect calls for reform with a garbled reference to “her emails!” or “Biden’s garage!” Your would-be secure channels will stay nice and porous for hackers.
To enable those hackers to get away with using AI to impersonate the secretary of state, install one who looks more and more like a 3-D printed shell of himself every day. Encourage him to behave like a GOP-brand automaton, like a memory of a man without a future.
Details of how the would-be Rubio impersonator presented himself are unknown. Still, presumably it was helpful for its creator to have a subject who already exists to execute whatever commands are fed to him by the user, uh, president.
It might also help to destabilize what the world expects an American secretary of state (or representatives of the American state in general) to sound like. Create an environment where it’s hardly inconceivable that a top government official would be reaching out through unofficial channels with capricious policy announcements, unhinged rants, conspiracy-mongering, wildly inappropriate emoji use, a basic phishing scam, or whatever else characterized AI Rubio’s reportedly “not very sophisticated” performance.
While you’re setting expectations, go ahead and create an administration in which everything and everyone is living out an uncanny valley performance with a one-man audience. The men on staff should aspire to the blown-out reality-TV aesthetics of the president who faked being rich and successful by branding everything in gold and emblazoning it all with his own name. The women should appear as variations on the theme of his gonzo high-femme ideal. (These are the only genders, obviously.) The president’s office should look like a photocopy of a photocopy of a Pinterest board labelled “Versailles Vibes.”
You know, like if you asked an LLM to “show me images of [power, wealth, respect, beauty] in the style of the Monopoly man, if he was also an ’80s real estate skeeze turned late night joke fixture turned racist grandpa.” And then, if the LLM did what LLMs are designed to do, it would yield something they have in common with Trump: pastiche. Create a blurry, reductionist, ham-fisted simulacrum of the thing itself from a few centuries’ worth of more specific, more nuanced ideas dreamed up by the kind of specific, nuanced humans in which the new machine has no interest.
Something else that might help prep the ground for AI Rubio’s arrival is if the administration embraced AI slop as its propaganda aesthetic, in a real ouroboros of artificiality, and in what multiple commentators have seen as evoking the political-cultural role played by Futurist art in mid-century Italian fascism (vis-à-vis Walter Benjamin’s famous critique in his 1935 essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Technological Reproducibility”). What even is real? Dissociative angst is good if it makes people cling to the clear us-and-them rules you’re establishing. Another ersatz arena the president loves is WWE; AI is just another kayfabe, maybe, a pageant whose artifice doesn’t matter as long as we get a good show out of the heroes vs. heels.
Finally, even though AI Rubio is no more (or so we think!), make sure to set things up so that this will almost definitely happen again. This is the long game: while the party in power may not have gotten its way in banning AI regulation in the just-passed budget bill (good hustle, though!), make sure they learn zero lessons from this incident. Keep hobbling cybersecurity operations while blindly supporting big tech and its endless AI hype cycle as though they’re heroes of the universe leading us into an economic and social utopia only they could know how to regulate, instead of a warring group of oligarchs who can’t agree on much more than the extent of the collateral damage.
If you’ve done all this, I can guarantee you your very own “Fake AI voice impersonating Secretary of State Marco Rubio contacts foreign ministers and US officials.” I can also guarantee that the real (“real”) Marco Rubio will respond with little more than a shrug and a few words delivered as though they aren’t a threat: “It could happen to anybody.”
Actually, from the orange felon on down, through his cabinet to the lowliest magat, they all have malfunctioning AI in their heads.
The only ones not possessing AI are just plain cruel and inhumane, like Stephen Miller.
How do you even know which ones are AI? They look like plastic reproductions, all of them. Including Stephen Miller, of course.