9news.com.au investigated the accessibility, ease of use, and efficacy of AI voice-cloning tools and we were able to convincingly recreate the voice of one of our journalists using an online voice-cloning tool.
You can listen to the two voices – real and AI-generated – in the video above.
Dr Diep N Nguyen, Associate Professor with the School of Electrical and Data Engineering at the University of Technology Sydney, said AI models can recreate vocal frequencies from a relatively short voice clip and string snippets into coherent sentences.
“That’s good enough for them to synthesise a reasonably high-quality voice clone.
“(But) the more a person talks the better.”
Nguyen added advanced AI models and algorithms can synthesise a voice so well “it is hard for an ordinary person to differentiate the cloned and the authentic one”.
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“No doubt it would be possible.
“With this one per cent difference, for humans, it would be very difficult to recognise the difference”.
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Scammers are increasingly using emerging technology to swindle victims out of large sums of money.
“(There’s been) many cases overseas, in the United Kingdom, United Arab Emirates, Hong Kong,” Nguyen said.
“I believe Australia is vulnerable to many cyber-attacks and voice cloning is for sure a high risk.”
The 15-year-old, who was on a ski trip, never said any of the words Jennifer DeStefano heard.
Nguyen said scammers could theoretically use existing social media videos and run them through an AI voice cloner to recreate a voice.
“With the ever-fast advances of AI models, less and less training data will be required to synthesise voices that are sufficiently close to the authentic ones for fraudulent behaviors.
“So be wary of your personal digital “profiling/data” that you may share.”
He added people should start second guessing any call, which makes a request for a money transfer; whether it be from a loved one or not.
“Then re-call the person who allegedly just called you to confirm.
“Let’s say it’s from my mum, I should call my mum and ask ‘did you just call me?’ and if she confirms, then yes it’s probably ok.”