Do You Trust Your Ears?

Voice impersonation has come a long way. With some historical voice data, hackers can do amazing things. A few months before the ill-fated UK money transfers, an AI company created a simulation of Joe Rogan’s voice (see reference below). While it clearly sounds faked at points, overall it is remarkable in its realism. Recently, Amazon released a new voice for its Alexa products, one of the most iconic voices of our time: Samuel L. Jackson. Neither Rogan nor Jackson recorded anything special for these efforts. It was all done by applying AI to publicly available data.

Obviously, there are hundreds of hours of both Samuel L. Jackson and Joe Rogan recorded speech to help train AI on. But the perpetrators of the energy company theft proved that with a limited scope you can create a convincing replication with considerably less. While the names of the companies involved have not been released, the parent company’s CEO was probably not a celebrity. They were able to craft a model good enough to fool one of his employees with presumably much less historical voice data.

The ramifications of this are just as scary as those involving video deepfakes. So much business is done via phone calls. There are likely to be many more cases like this unless companies develop countermeasures, such as code words to confirm that you’re talking to the real person. Imagine diplomatic calls. If a nation could spoof a phone call as coming from somewhere else, they could impersonate heads of state or other officials and sow discord. Even journalism is vulnerable, but they developed the solution to this problem decades ago. Reporters often demand an in-person meeting to confirm the veracity of an explosive story before running with it. Now, they must have even stronger doubts about anyone contacting them via phone.

But there are also legitimate, at least non-criminal, uses. A company called Descript is developing a product to allow users to “edit” their podcasts, add words or sentences they didn’t say and fix problems without needing to re-record. What does this technology mean for the future of voice actors? Will we ever need a human to voice characters such as Mickey Mouse or Bart Simpson again? Debate has raged about machines taking jobs from humans, but I don’t know if we saw this coming. An even more mundane use is as a gift. Imagine developing a card for a spouse, child, or friend that they could make say anything they wanted in your voice.

So next time your boss calls… well you should probably still just do what they say. But perhaps listen a little more carefully and follow up if it seems strange.