I cloned my own voice to prank a friend, and… Wow, it was a gut-dropping moment when I understood just how dangerous this tool is for precisely this type of scam.
It’s one thing to hear about it, but to actual experience it… Terrifying.
We neeeed a guide 👋
Check out ElevenLabs.
Mind sharing more info about the prank? Sounds like an interesting story
Oh, it was nothing more than just showing off the technology, really. It wasn’t a committed bit.
I cloned my voice then left a voicemail that said something like: “hey buddy it’s me. My car broke down and I’m at… Actually I don’t know where I’m at. I walked to the gas station and borrowed this guy’s phone. He said he’ll give me a ride into to town if I can get him $50 bucks. Could you venmo it to him at @franks_diner? I’ll get you back as soon as I can find my phone. … By the way this is really me, definitely not a bot pretending to be me.”
Do you guys remember when the T-1000 did this?
What’s wrong with Wolfie? I can hear him barking…
Your parents are dead
In Terminator 1 the T-800 made a scam call to Sarah in order to find out where she is. He deepfaked the voice of Sarah’s mother, and she fell for it.
As someone who has an uncanny ability to recognize voices, I’m skeptical about how good these really are. Of course, most people don’t share that ability.
Meanwhile, I could probably be fooled by a picture.
Hmm, I understand your sentiment, but how would you know. Of course you’d pick out the bad dupes but this technology is getting really good that I fear it would go unnoticed, especially if they keep the detectable ones to reinforce bias
I always thought being able to recognize voices is a common skill? Is it not?
Very much not, in my experience.
Yeah, does a familiar voice mean a famous person or personal friend?
For me, it could be either. Some of us recognize people by their voices more than by their faces.
I don’t have examples but having listened to some samples of various Ai generated clones (the one paper had samples of I believe 10s, 30s, 1min, 5 min) and all of them progressively sounded better. The 10 second one basically sounded like a voice call whose bit rate dropped out mid word. And the voice so long as you used words that were similar in phoenix sounded pretty close. Although this is just my experience, but to you it might sound pretty bad while to me it sounded pretty reasonable if under bad audio conditions.
https://github.com/CorentinJ/Real-Time-Voice-Cloning
This is the main one I’ve seen examples of. You’ll have to find the samples yourself, I believe it was in the actual paper?
That code was state of the art (for free software) when the author first published it with his master’s thesis four years ago, but it hasn’t improved a lot since then and I wouldn’t recommend it today. See the Heads Up section of the readme. Coqui (a free software Mozilla spinoff) is better but also is sadly still nowhere near as convincing as the proprietary stuff.
Wait it’s been 4 years? Time really goes by. Yeah with most Ai things I assumed those with more time and resources would create better models. OS Ai is at a great disadvantage when it comes to data set size and compute power.
Good luck criminals. I ignore nearly every call.
Yeah but they’ll call your family. A friend of mine was recently affected by this, a scammer had a clone of her voice asking for around $300 to fix their car because they got stranded in the middle of nowhere. So they call up your parents and to your mom it’s like “Oh no! My baby! Of course I’ll help you!” and your mom gives them $300 thinking it’s you.
Yeah my family knows better. I don’t call anyone either plus I’ve got all of my family on DEFCON 1 when it comes to asking for money. Had someone try and scam my mom via Facebook pretending to be my sister. I have family members contacting me ALL the time with issues with their stuff so they don’t trust anything at all.
This all stems from myself getting scammed nearly 20 years ago via email so I’ve educated everyone immensely.
Whomever is stupid enough to think that Tom Hanks is calling you personally probably needs a court appointed guardian.
Did you read the article? It’s talking about taking kids voices from TikTok and shit. Social media. People have been posting videos of themselves talking for years. That’s enough data to train an ai to leave a message saying, “mom, I lost my phone and I’m in trouble. I need some money.” Or something of that sort. It’s been happening for a long time. This is only making it more confincing
I’m so fucking glad that I’ve hardly ever had my voice and likeness posted publicly on the internet
Same. I managed to stay off of social media, and I was the prime age for it at every turn. MySpace came around when I was in middle school/early high school. Facebook was opened up to everyone in late high school. Instagram came around when I was in college—and when I was traveling. I’m so glad I was that super annoying kid calling everything a conspiracy to steal my likeness/steal my data…who knew my need to be a contrarian as an anarchist teen would be so helpful?
I mean…I also grew up into an anarchist adult. So I just got lucky that I found the right books and music to push me in that direction young.
What books did you read?
enough data
To be clear, about three seconds of your voice is “enough”.
The reference of the entire article is talking about scammers using AI models of voice you know and understand. None of these scam rings have the time to break it down to your family.
You sure? It’s very easy for these scammers to make a bot to trawl those “address/people lookup” sites, get family names and numbers, and then search for anyone in there’s public social media, and compile that footage. It wouldn’t be much work at all after creating the bot. Those creepy people lookup sites list an absurd amount of information. It would make doing this very easy. And think of how much work already goes into scams that use sheer numbers to boost likelihood of working with a basic ruse. If they can trim that list of available phone numbers down to—even if it were just 30%, or 15% of available phone numbers now with personal information and an in by imitating someone they know and love? That’s still a fuck load of people. And the likelihood of success would shoot WAY up while actually cutting down on the amount of work they’d need to do. So I’d argue you have that backwards.
Unless you actually know Tom Hanks personally and are expecting a call from him, of course.
BADONK!
The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.
