In a potentially dangerous development for scam calls, AI-generated voices are now "indistinguishable" from real human voices, researchers say. — Photo: Sebastian Gollnow/dpa
LONDON: Tests carried out in London have shown that so-called "deepfake" voices, created using widely available software, sound so much like the real thing that most people cannot tell the difference.
AI-generated voices are "now indistinguishable from real human voices," a team of Queen Mary University of London researchers concluded, after carrying out a study during which people listened to samples of artificial and real voices.
"AI voice technology has now reached a stage where it can create ‘voice clones’ or deepfakes which sound just as realistic as human recordings," according to the team.
For the study published in the science journal PLOS One in September, the team said they "compared real human voices with two different types of synthetic voices, generated using state-of-the-art AI voice synthesis tools."
"Some were cloned from voice recordings of real humans, intended to mimic them, and others were generated from a large voice model and did not have a specific human counterpart," they said, explaining that study participants were asked to evaluate which voices sounded most realistic, and which sounded most dominant or trustworthy.
"It was only a matter of time until AI technology began to produce naturalistic, human-sounding speech," said Nadine Lavan, senior lecturer in psychology at Queen Mary University of London, who warned that "we urgently need to understand how people perceive these realistic voices."
"The process required minimal expertise, only a few minutes of voice recordings, and almost no money," Lavan said, adding that the fakes were made using "commercially available software." – dpa
