AI can steal your voice, and there’s not much you can do about it
According to a Consumer Reports investigation, most leading artificial intelligence voice cloning programs have no meaningful barriers to stop people from nonconsensually impersonating others.
Voice cloning AI technology has made remarkable strides in recent years, and many services can effectively mimic a person’s cadence with only a few seconds of sample audio. A flashpoint moment came during the Democratic primaries last year, when robocalls of a fake Joe Biden spammed voters telling them not to vote. The political consultant who admitted to masterminding the scheme was fined $6 million, and the Federal Communications Commission has since banned AI-generated robocalls.
A new survey of the six leading publicly available AI voice cloning tools found that five have easily bypassable safeguards, making it simple to clone a person’s voice without their consent. Deepfake audio detection software often struggles to tell the difference between real and synthetic voices.
The technology works by taking an audio sample of a person speaking and then extrapolating that person’s voice into a synthetic audio file. Without safeguards in place, anyone who registers an account can simply upload audio of an individual speaking, such as from a TikTok or YouTube video, and have the service imitate them.
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