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The Rise of AI-Generated Voice Deepfakes

By Jeffrey N. Rosenthal
October 01, 2023

By now most of us are used to interacting with synthetic or artificial voices. Just call a customer service help line or summon a digital personal assistant (like Alexa or Siri) and you would expect to hear a computer-generated voice. But what if the synthetic voice sounded exactly like you? Or worse, was then used to say things you would never say?

Several tech companies are making strides training speech recognition tools to mimic the speaker's voice. And while this can improve user clarity and accessibility for those with physical limitations, there is another, more troubling trend: the prevalence of "voice deepfakes" — i.e., creating synthetic voices from unknowing (or unwilling) participants using generative artificial intelligence.

In February, two separate reporters successfully tricked their financial institutions' identity verification software with AI-generated synthetic voices to gain access to accounts. This attracted the attention of the chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, who noted the "prevalence of video clips publicly available on Instagram, TikTok and YouTube have made it easier than ever for bad actors to replicate the voices of other people." As a result, anyone with vocal recordings online can be targeted for such attacks.

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