In the very near future, you may get a phone call from someone in desperate need of your help. to You should send the money immediately. And you might be convinced it’s them because, well, you know their voice.
Artificial intelligence is changing that. New generative A.I. Tools can generate all kinds of output using simple text prompts. essays written in a particular author’s style, images worthy of art prizes, and—with just a snippet of someone’s voice to work with—speech that sounds convincingly like a particular person.
Microsoft Researchers were in January demonstrated A text-to-speech A.I. tool that, when given just a three-second audio sample, can closely simulate a person’s voice. They didn’t share their code with others to Play around; they instead warned that the VALLE tool was dangerous. “may carry potential risks in misuse…such as spoofing voice identification or impersonating a specific speaker.”
But similar technology is already out in the wild—and scammers are taking advantage of it. If they can find 30 seconds of your voice somewhere online, there’s a good chance they can clone it—and make it say anything.
“Two years ago, even a year ago, you needed a lot of audio to clone a person’s voice. Now…if you have a Facebook page…or if you’ve recorded a TikTok and your voice is in there for 30 seconds, people can clone your voice,” Hany Farid from the University of California at Berkeley is an expert in digital forensics. Washington Post.
‘The money’s gone’
It Post reported this weekend The peril: How one Canadian family became a victim to Scammers using A.I. voice cloning—and lost thousand of dollars. An elderly parent was told this by “lawyer” Their son, who had been in an accident that killed an American diplomat, was now in prison and required money to pay legal fees.
The pretended attorney then allegedly handed the phone in to He told his parents that the father loved him and valued them. The voice of a cloned man sounded “close enough for my parents to truly believe they did speak with me,” Benjamin Perkin was Benjamin’s son. Post.
They sent their parents more than $15,000 via a Bitcoin terminal to—well, to Not scammers to As they imagined, their son.
“The money’s gone,” Perkin spoke to the newspaper. “There’s no insurance. There’s no getting it back. It’s gone.”
A company offers an A.I. generative service. ElevenLabs is a company that offers generative A.I. tweeted It was witnessing on January 30 “an increasing number of voice cloning misuse cases.” Next day it was announced The voice-cloning capabilities would not be possible to VoiceLab users can download the tool for free, VoiceLab.
The Sunday Review Attended out to Although the company requested comment, they didn’t receive an immediate response.
“Almost all of the malicious content was generated by free, anonymous accounts,” It wrote. “Additional identity verification is necessary. For this reason, VoiceLab will only be available on paid tiers.” Subscribers begin at $5 per calendar month
Card verification won’t stop every bad actor, it acknowledged, but it would make users less anonymous and “force them to think twice.”
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