The Shotline is the confluence of bleeding-edge, first-of-its-kind AI audio, automated digital technology, and a traditional “hammer the phones” approach to American political activism. This groundbreaking approach embodied not only the spirit, but also the aesthetic of a grassroots campaign, and was hailed in the media as a “new frontier in politics” (NPR) and “a new era for artificial intelligence” (WSJ). Designed for longevity,

The Shotline continues to solicit new voices for the cause as it builds momentum toward the 2024 November election.

Founded in response to the 2018 Parkland School shooting, Change The Ref and March For Our Lives work in relentless pursuit of gun reform. Today, gun reform is desperately needed: every day in the U.S., 120 Americans are killed by guns. Mass shootings, school shootings, suicides—these horrors are an inescapable part of life for every citizen. In 2023 alone, 43,036 people were killed by guns, while mass shootings rose to their second highest year ever. Polls prove a majority of the population wants sensible gun reform laws, such as universal background checks, yet elected officials refuse to act due to pro-gun lobbying groups with more money and influence. Despite the number of deaths and shootings, not one federal gun law was passed in 2023. One of the most effective ways to combat the lobbying groups and compel elected officials to make change is to pick up the phone and call them, but the problem is that those who have been killed by gun violence have lost their ability to speak out for change. How could we get lawmakers to finally listen? Our answer was to connect Congress directly with the human behind the statistic by re-creating the voices of shooting victims using AI technology. Each voice was turned into a phone call that demanded change from lawmakers, and could be sent through our interactive online platform, The Shotline. With it, visitors could trigger AI calls to their elected officials and join a national movement for responsible gun reform.

In 2023, the U.S. experienced more than 43,000 gun violence deaths, and an 8% increase in mass shootings over 2020 (a record-breaking year), yet zero federal gun laws were passed. We knew we couldn’t change the law without changing the mind of the lawmakers. To do it, we needed to galvanize action that affected them directly.

To this day, the phone call is still one of the most effective ways of compelling change in Congress. This is especially true if the phone doesn’t stop ringing—the more calls, the better. Putting constant pressure on Congress members makes it impossible for them to ignore their constituents.

We needed to move away from typical awareness campaigns that encourage vocal advocacy, and instead create something directly actionable (i.e., calls to Congress) by giving citizens a tool that made it easier to demand change in a way they’d never seen—or heard—before.

The thousands killed by gun violence every year in America have lost their ability to speak out. So we devised a never-heard-before way to give their voices back. Using the latest innovations in AI technology, we re-created the voices of shooting victims from across the country, including the mannerisms and cadence they had when they were alive. Then we built a digital advocacy platform called The Shotline, where anyone in the country could—with just a few clicks—trigger the AI voices to call Congress, sharing stories of how they were killed, and demanding reform. To do it, visitors simply entered their zip code and selected a voice, which would then call their representative. The Shotline makes it simple to flood lawmaker’s phone lines, forcing them to face the true results of their inaction. The Shotline remains active, continuing to add more voices and place calls, until change is made.

Over the course of three months, we worked with the families of gun violence victims to collect home videos, written accounts, and social media posts of their loved ones. With these resources, we used AI to re-create the voices of the gun violence victims themselves, accurately capturing the personalities and mannerisms with which the victims spoke in life. We also used these same resources to create phone call scripts that reflected the passions, hobbies, and dreams these individuals had when they were alive.

The calls lived on our digital website experience called The Shotline. Anyone could visit this site to get a sense of who these victims were, hear their AI calls and, most importantly, send those calls to Congress. With just a few clicks and their zip code, users could send these AI calls directly to their specific representatives.

Created by our in-house team of lawyers and creative technologists, this “programmatic calling system” was the centerpiece of the Shotline. It automated the communications process to make taking action a seamless experience for the user. This would be the world’s first by-the-books system designed to place AI voice calls to the U.S. federal government.

As a campaign based entirely around AI audio, we needed a strong visual way to bring the campaign, and the real victims within it, to life. We created a design system based on a modern and modular soundwave, rendered in black and white as a contrast to the futuristic imagery typically associated with AI. To bring humanity to our digital voices, we created a custom black-and-white illustration style made entirely out of soundwaves. Portraits of each of the victims were manually created in this new style, living on the website as well as our media touchpoints.